Opening Soon | Kapwani Kiwanga: Changing States
The first national retrospective by Kapwani Kiwanga, winner of the 2025 Joan Miró Prize, will open on 29 April, supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) and CUPRA. Kiwanga creates a compelling internal architecture that explores the materiality, economic exchanges and geological temporalities that shape our relationship with spaces.
Conceived specifically for the Fundació Joan Miró, the show will fully reflect her explorations on space and control, offering new perspectives for viewing architecture and its power structures from a radically contemporary standpoint.
Kiwanga's work displays an internal structure of exceptional precision and coherence. Her artistic practice organically engages with architecture, as she explores the materiality, resource flows, exchange economies and the power structures that organise territories and bodies. Having conducted research into architectural structures and material circulation systems, in recent years she has broadened this paradigm towards transhuman temporalities, such as geology, thereby enabling an understanding of spaces and systems from scales that go beyond human time.
An anthropologist by training and an artist with an international career, Kiwanga has created a body of work that uses formally refined installations to deconstruct hegemonic narratives and examine the relationships between power, architecture, territory and bodies. The Joan Miró Prize jury recognised her ability to transform complex historical and social processes into poetic and conceptually rigorous forms that are capable of establishing a profound dialogue with Miró's radicalism and Sert's architecture.
The exhibition will bring together a selection of already created works and a significant proportion of new pieces that the artist has produced specifically for the Barcelona show. It will explore these themes and focus on three key areas: materiality, economic and cultural exchanges and their structural tensions, as well as contemporary crises related to territory, ranging from farming to housing. All these aspects connect directly with the architectural reading that runs through this year's programme, positioning Kiwanga's work as a space from which to reconsider how the world we inhabit is constructed.
An exhibition in collaboration with TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary.
Artist Bio
Kapwani Kiwanga (b. 1978, Hamilton, Canada) traces the pervasive impact of power asymmetries by placing historic narratives in dialogue with contemporary realities, the archive, and tomorrow’s possibilities. Her work is research-driven, instigated by marginalised or forgotten histories, and articulated across a range of materials and mediums including sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance. Kiwanga co-opts the canon; she turns systems of power back on themselves, in art and in parsing broader histories. In this manner Kiwanga has developed an aesthetic vocabulary that she described as “exit strategies,” works that invite one to see things from multiple perspectives so as to look differently at existing structures and find ways to navigate the future differently.
In 2024, Kiwanga’s acclaimed solo presentation titled 'Trinket', for the Canadian Pavilion, at the 60th Venice Biennale, commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada, debuted a site-responsive sculptural installation made of conterie, also known as seed beads. The installation examined Global trade and transactional relations between Africa and Europe and continues the artist’s concerns with how diverse forms of power are manifested.
In 2023, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg presented Kiwanga’s first comprehensive mid-career retrospective, 'The Length of the Horizon'. This show includes her memorable Venice Biennale installation Terrarium (2022).
In 2020, Kiwanga received the Prix Marcel Duchamp (FR). She was also the winner of the Frieze Artist Award (USA) and the annual Sobey Art Award (CA) in 2018.
Selected group exhibitions include: Whitechapel Gallery, London (UK); Serpentine Galleries, London (UK); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (CHN); MOT – Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (JPN); Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (DE); Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden – MACAAL, Marrakech (MAR); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (CA); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (USA); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (USA); Centre Pompidou, Paris (FR); Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal (CA); ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Aarhus (DK) and MACBA, Barcelona (ESP).
Solo exhibitions include: Copenhagen Contemporary, Haus der Kunst, Munich; Kunstinstituut Melly – Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel/Bienne; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Albertinum museum, Dresden; Artpace, San Antonio; Esker Foundation, Calgary; Tramway, Glasgow International; Power Plant, Toronto; Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago; South London Gallery, London and Jeu de Paume, Paris.
Collections include: NOMAS Foundation, Rome, Italy; FRAC PACA, Marseille, France; Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; Museo de Arte Contemporanea de Castilla y Léon, MUSAC, León, Spain; Musée départemental d’art contemporain de Rochechouart, Rochechouart, France; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France; Kadist Art Foundation Paris/San Francisco, France and USA; and Mead Art Museum, Amherst, USA.
Kiwanga lives and works in Paris.
