After an appearance at the last Venice Biennale, met with high acclaim, recent solo exhibitions at the New Museum in New York, the Haus der Kunst in Munich and MOCA in Toronto — and before her anticipated contribution to the Canadian Pavilion for the 60^th Venice Biennale in 2024 —, Kapwani Kiwanga will take over the Nave of the museum. On this occasion, she will unveil her new project, elaborated in dialogue with the history of the site — namely, the Entrepôt Lainé, which was used as a warehouse for colonial goods during the 19^th century, before being rehabilitated in the early 70s into one of the most emblematic venues for contemporary art in France and abroad.

Inviting Kapwani Kiwanga to kick off this celebration was a self-evident choice, considering the dual roots of her artistic practice, attached both to the opening up of temporal and spatial pathways — recursively modifying our approach and interpretation of history —, and to the exploration of minimalistic, pared-down patterns, that have figured with such recurrent insistence throughout the history of our institution. Kapwani Kiwanga’s work sheds light on a plurality of little-known, even invisibilised dimensions of history — anchoring systems of power at a local scale and unveiling the structural role of asymmetries in its organisation.

Kiwanga, now regarded as one of the most significant artists of her generation, followed unexpected career paths from anthropology and comparative religious studies to documentary filmmaking, before turning to contemporary art, about ten years ago. Because of her initial academic training, her practice is grounded in meticulous research, through which lens she approaches the cultural structure of knowledge and systems. The materiality of her work is characterised by a profusion of heterogeneous elements (sisal, textiles, light, and flowers), each symbolically referring to a specific historical, social and political context — finally cohering into immersive and stimulating in-situ installations.

From the start, her project for the Nave grew from multiple sources. First, Kiwanga explored the architectural frame of the building; retracing the sequence of great artistic gestures that infused the history of the site since the reopening of the Entrepôt as a museum. She turned on its head the requisite for formal fulfillment implied by the overwhelming structural grandeur of the Nave —subverting the very premises of monumentality to propose an installation whose tremendous impact depends upon lightness and fluidity.

The presence of water — and of some of the goods stored in the Entrepôt Lainé during the 19^th century —, soon gained a central role in the elaboration of the project. The Garonne river, that courses North along the quays, bears witness, with its many ebbs and flows, to the unacknowledged refuse of history — in a city where wealth largely depended upon the exploitation of colonial resources. Kiwanga thus delights in playing with natural elements, whose economic, social and political connotative worth cohabits with fluidity and transitoriness.

Making use of such tangible and intangible materials, conjugating aesthetic properties with symbolic weight, Kapwani Kiwanga invites us on an interpretative quest, skating the edge of lucidity and dream-thought — so that we may gain renewed insight on past and present issues, and try and reform our outlook of the future.

Curator: Sandra Patron,
Director of the Capc Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux

Kapwani Kiwanga’s exhibition, Retenue, benefited from the sponsorship of the Canadian Cultural Centre / Embassy of Canada, Paris.

It also received support from Goodman Gallery, in Johannesburg, Cape Town and London, and Galerie Poggi, in Paris.