Kapwani Kiwanga

Kapwani Kiwanga (born 1978, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) is a French-Canadian artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, installation, video, sound, photography, and performance. Research-driven and conceptually rigorous, her work examines systems of power through the lens of suppressed histories, colonialism, institutional structures, and the everyday mechanisms through which authority is exercised and remembered.  Kiwanga studied anthropology and comparative religion at McGill University in Montreal before pursuing art studies at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris. That academic background remains central to her practice: her projects frequently move between fact and speculation, using the visual language of display, classification, architecture, and ceremony to unsettle dominant historical frameworks and create space for marginalized or obscured perspectives. Across bodies of work, she has investigated subjects such as decolonization, race, gender, social control, and diasporic memory, often through materials whose political meanings are subtle but deeply charged.  Her work has been presented widely in major international exhibitions and institutions. In 2024, Kiwanga represented Canada at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia with Trinket, a site-specific installation for the Canada Pavilion. Her first major mid-career retrospective, The Length of the Horizon, was presented at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in 2023. She has also had solo presentations and exhibitions at institutions including the New Museum, New York; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto; Serralves Museum, Porto; CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Kiwanga is the recipient of several major honors, including the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2020, the Sobey Art Award in 2018, the Frieze Artist Award in 2018, and the Zurich Art Prize in 2022. She lives and works between Paris and Berlin.