Kapwani Kiwanga

Before becoming an artist, Kapwani Kiwanga (born 1978) studied anthropology and comparative religion in her native Canada. This academic background informs her multimedia installations building off her research on racism, colonialism and the African diaspora.

Published in parallel with the artist's first major exhibition in the US (at the New Museum, summer 2022), this is the first monograph on Paris-based Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga (born 1978). Unveiling the pervasive impact of power asymmetries by placing narratives from the past in dialogue with contemporary realities, Kiwanga's work is research-driven, instigated by marginalized or forgotten histories, and articulated across a range of mediums.
This publication documents Kiwanga’s entire body of work, highlighting her most important fields of research, from disciplinary architecture and Afrofuturism to her singular takes on Minimalism and political and spiritual beliefs. Gathering contributions by art historians, art critics, philosophers, curators and anthropologists, it draws a multidisciplinary and polyphonic portrait of Kiwanga’s practice and thinking.

Over the past decade, Canadian-born, Paris-based artist Kapwani Kiwanga (born 1978) has created complex installations, sculptures, performance lectures and films that consider marginalized histories and colonial economies. Drawing from her training in anthropology and the social sciences, Kiwanga’s ethereal environments bring attention to the backstories of systems of authority and their embodied effects.
Accompanying the exhibition at the New Museum, this catalog provides one of the most complete overviews of Kiwanga's work in sculpture and installation. Inspired by the early 18th-century New York legal codes known as “lantern laws”—ordinances that required all Black, Indigenous or mixed-race individuals over 14 to carry lanterns or lit candles after dark if not accompanied by a white person—her new commission for the New Museum weaves together different layers of opacity and transparency through the use of large-scale curtains and mirrored surfaces, playing with natural light and darkness.