SOLO SHOW
10 DECEMBER—12 FEBRUARY 2022
State of Concept Athens presented the first solo exhibition of Kapwani Kiwanga in Greece, entitled “Deposits”, curated by iLiana Fokianaki.
The exhibition featured a new commissioned piece and a selection of works that resulted from a long dialogue between the artist and the curator. In 2020 they collaborated for the exhibition “Kapwani Kiwanga, New work” at Kunstinstituut Melly, part of which is travelling at State of Concept Athens. Through their dialogue, a question was born: “What is the role of plants in the histories of human struggle for liberation?”
Kapwani Kiwanga’s work revolves around the epistemologies of botany, its histories and their relation to acts of resistance. Kiwanga’s desire to unveil plants as protagonists of the “opacity of resistance,” links the histories of resistance from previous centuries to the modern histories of civil rights movements and the current antiracist global movement.
The exhibition “Deposits” was supported by Institut Francais.
Kapwani Kiwanga (b. Hamilton, Canada) is Franco-Canadian, she lives and works in Paris. Kiwanga studied Anthropology and Comparative Religion at McGill University in Montreal and Art at l’école des Beaux-Arts de Paris. 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. Recent solo exhibitions include: Palais de Tokyo Paris (2022), MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto , Kunstinstituut Melly (Fkwa Witte de With), Haus der Kunst Munich, MIT List Visual Arts Center a.o.
The commissioned work “Bequest” (2021) was a collaboration of the artist with weaver Vasso Damkou.
