Kapwani Kiwanga Wins Sobey Art Award
Kapwani Kiwanga (courtesy of National Gallery of Canada, photo by miv photography)
Kapwani Kiwanga is the winner of this year's Sobey Art Award, confirming her position as a rising star in the Canadian contemporary art scene.
Kiwanga, the award's Ontario finalist, says the $100,000 prize will allow her to focus more intently on her work in coming years.
“The Sobey Art Award is a humbling encouragement to continue to make work that asks us to look anew at society and its past, while allowing us to imagine unbounded possibilities," she said.
Kiwanga, born in Hamilton, Ont., and raised in nearby Brantford, is based in Paris. Her work has appeared in the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and she has had solo shows at Toronto's Power Plant and Calgary's Esker Foundation.
She is the 15th Canadian artist under 40 to win the prestigious award.
The four other finalists – Jordan Bennett, from the Atlantic region; Jon Rafman, from Quebec; Joi T. Arcand, representing the Prairies and the North; and Jeneen Frei Njootli from the West Coast and Yukon – each take home $25,000.
The jury was impressed with Kiwanga’s critically engaged and visually compelling work.
"Kiwanga creates a visual language to reconsider complexities and peripheries of history," the jury said in a statement. "She points to fissures in our human narrative.
"Using archival materials and referencing anthropology, agriculture and urban design, among other sources, she reveals global effects of the colonial project. In so doing, she addresses hidden authoritarian structures, institutional devices and power imbalances to help us see the world differently.”
The jury was chaired by Josée Drouin-Brisebois, senior curator of contemporary art at the National Gallery of Canada, and included Heather Igloliorte, an independent curator and Concordia University research chair in Indigenous art history and community engagement; Jean-François Bélisle, executive director and chief curator of the Musée d’art de Joliette; November Paynter, director of programs at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto Canada; Kristy Trinier, executive director of the Southern Alberta Art Gallery; Melanie O’Brian, director of the Simon Fraser University Galleries; and international juror, Séamus Kealy, the director of the Salzburger Kunstverein in Austria.
Work by the five shortlisted artists is on view at the National Gallery of Canada until Feb. 10. Three of the 20 artists on the award's long list receive international art residencies funded by the Sobey Art Foundation.
Previous Sobey winners include Brian Jungen (2002), Jean-Pierre Gauthier (2004), Annie Pootoogook (2006), Michel de Broin (2007), Tim Lee (2008), David Altmejd (2009), Daniel Barrow (2010), Daniel Young and Christian Giroux (2011), Raphaëlle de Groot (2012), Duane Linklater (2013), Nadia Myre (2014), Abbas Akhavan (2015), Jeremy Shaw (2016) and Ursula Johnson (2017).
Source: National Gallery of Canada
