Description: Kapwani Kiwanga is a Canadian-born, Paris-based artist who creates installations, performances, and video art that bring together her training in anthropology and comparative religions, while also drawing on her interest in history, memory, and mythology. Kiwanga deliberately mixes truth and fiction in her work, confusing the two in order to create fantastical narratives that are nonetheless rooted in rigorous research. This book presents works by Kiwanga investigating disciplinary architectures that were presented at the Logan Center Gallery at the University of Chicago and the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto. Opening with a compelling array of installation images, research documents, and film stills from a newly commissioned video, the book also includes a curatorial essay surveying Kiwanga's work to date, an essay that offers an unfinished cartography of the genealogy of disciplinary spaces, and an interview with Kiwanga that covers her research interests and methodology.
Brief description:
Yesomi Umolu is exhibitions curator at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago. She oversees a program of international contemporary art in the Logan Center Gallery and contributes to a number of strategic committees that drive the development of contemporary art, architecture, and urbanism on campus. In addition to her curatorial role, Umolu is a lecturer in the university's Humanities Division.
Umolu's recent curatorial projects at the Logan Center include Candice Lin: A Hard White Body, a Porous Slip (2018), Cinthia Marcelle and Tiago Mata Machado: Divine Violence (2017), Kapwani Kiwanga: The sum and its parts (2017) and So-called Utopias (2015). She served as artistic director of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial and she is a 2016 recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Fellowship.
Umolu was a member of the curatorial advisory board for the United States Pavilion at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, commissioned by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago. She currently sits on the board of trustees of the Graham Foundation, Chicago.
Review Quotes: Kapwani Kiwanga 2017 Frieze Artist Award-- "Kapwani Kiwanga Frieze Artist Award"