Kiluanji Kia Henda

Kiluanji Kia Henda (born July 16, 1979, in Luanda, Angola) is an Angolan multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans photography, video, film, installation, sculpture, performance, sound, and experimental theater. Working with humor, irony, fiction, and the manipulation of public space, Kia Henda investigates colonial history, post-independence Angola, political power, collective memory, migration, urban development, race, and the unstable construction of national identity. His work frequently takes architecture, monuments, landscapes, and abandoned or repurposed structures as points of departure for examining how political histories remain embedded within physical environments.  Born four years after Angola gained independence from Portugal, Kia Henda grew up during the country’s long civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 2002. This history profoundly informs his work, but rather than producing straightforward documentary accounts, he often uses speculative fiction and satire to destabilize official narratives. In projects such as Homem Novo, Redefining the Power, and A City Called Mirage, colonial monuments, empty plinths, desert landscapes, and imagined cities become stages on which historical authority can be removed, replaced, parodied, or reinvented. His work asks who is allowed to produce history and how architecture, photography, museums, monuments, and public space participate in shaping collective memory. Kia Henda is a self-taught artist whose visual education developed through growing up around photography enthusiasts and through his engagement with music, avant-garde theater, and collaborative artistic communities in Luanda. Photography remains foundational to his practice, but his projects increasingly move between media. Works such as The Geometric Ballad of Fear, A Espiral do Medo, This Is My Blood, and A Healing Path for Phantom Pain use architectural barriers, landscapes, sculpture, film, and performance to examine segregation, migration, inequality, colonial violence, war, and the psychological afterlives of political conflict.  His work has been presented internationally at the Venice Biennale, São Paulo Biennale, Dakar Biennale, Gwangju Biennale, Sharjah Biennial, Manifesta, New Museum, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Guggenheim Bilbao, M Leuven, and other institutions. He received Angola’s National Prize for Culture and Arts in 2012 and the Frieze Artist Award in 2017. Recent presentations include Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica at MACBA and the Barbican, Recursions: a cartography of unfinished grounds at Galeria Municipal do Porto, and the 60th Venice Biennale. Kia Henda currently works between Luanda and Lisbon.