Kapwani Kiwanga: The Length of the Horizon @ Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg + Copenhagen Contemporary

Kapwani Kiwanga 

The Length of the Horizon

Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

September 16, 2023 – January 7, 2024

The Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg presents Kapwani Kiwanga. The Length of the Horizon, the first institutional and comprehensive mid-career retrospective of the artist’s work worldwide. Research-based, thematically highly topical, and futureoriented—these terms can be used to describe the impressive oeuvre of KAPWANI KIWANGA (b. 1978). The Canadian and French artist recently received numerous international awards and will represent Canada at the 60th Biennale di Venezia in 2024. The exhibition brings together works in all media from Kiwanga’s artistic beginnings to the present day, including the highly acclaimed installation Terrarium (2022), her sixteen-meter-long colored light tunnel pink-blue (2017), and her sculptural series Glow (2019, ongoing). Kapwani Kiwanga’s expansive works come together in the exhibition to create a uniquely aesthetic, insightful, and physical experience.

Uta Ruhkamp, curator of the exhibition, explains: “Kapwani Kiwanga’s works are multi-layered. They are extremely complex artistic translations of well-researched situations, conditions, and mechanisms of our society and the world we live in. Her installations, paintings, works on paper, photographs, and video works are captivating in their aesthetics, formal clarity, and reduction. Yet, her sensitive choice of materials and colors is always grounded in deeper levels of meaning that charge her works both historically and socio-politically and break the visual pleasure in terms of content. Kapwani Kiwanga poetically surveys and expands our social horizons. I am particularly pleased that she is developing a new work with shade cloth, one of her ‘signature’ materials, for her exhibition with us.”

As a graduate anthropologist and scholar of comparative religion, Kapwani Kiwanga has the academic background for her social analytical practice. In her work, she employs so-called exit strategies: “I’m not trying to restate what one knows. I’m also trying to see what ways to get past what we know. To do that requires very simple things like just looking at it differently, or just even looking at it for the first time. […] These ‘exit strategies’ are very personal, but they can be collectively experienced as well,” Kapwani Kiwanga summarizes.

The artist searches for a vocabulary to look at existing structures and power relations from new perspectives in order to think about them differently in the future. The visually impressive works initially appeal to the viewer in a very sensual way. At second glance, the historical-political dimensions of her works reveal themselves, some of which surprise and unsettle. Glass, two-way mirrors, shade cloth, stone, sand, sisal, and plants, as well as light and color—for Kapwani Kiwanga, these are not value-neutral materials, but rather materials charged with content. Their choice is never purely aesthetic. Rather, she translates social, geological, ecological, historical, and diasporic themes into powerful artistic statements. She stages material histories in which the material is at once ambassador, metaphor, bearer of experience, and socio-political instrument. In this way, she shakes the foundations of our cultural socialization. She refines our sense for “hidden” social mechanisms, structural injustices, as well as global and everyday power asymmetries.

Kapwani Kiwanga. The Length of the Horizon begins for visitors with a surprising spatial and color experience: The walk through the colored light corridor pink-blue marks the transition from the entrance area of the museum to the heart of the presentation. The tunnel-like installation not only forces visitors into an austere architecture, but the immersive experience also reveals how light and color are used in everyday urban contexts and disciplinary architectures to control behavior. The work references research on the psychological effects of color. For example, Baker-Miller pink is said to have an aggression-reducing effect on prisoners. For pink-blue, Kapwani Kiwanga combines this pink tone with fluorescent blue light, which is also used to regulate behavior and prevent intravenous drug use in public spaces, as veins are difficult to locate in this light. Kapwani Kiwanga raises physical and mental awareness of everyday disciplinary structures.

In the approximately 1,800 m2 exhibition hall, the artist’s key works come together to form a pointed tour through her oeuvre. It becomes clear how Kapwani Kiwanga uses the effective power of color, light, and material to tell global histories from new perspectives.

While in the powerfully colorful installation The Marias (2020) it is the bright yellow of the walls and the pedestals that initially captivates the viewer, Kapwani Kiwanga uses the delicate paper versions of the peacock bush to address the toxic nature of the ornamental plant. As the naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) described in her famous collection Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, the peacock flower was used by enslaved women in Suriname as an abortifacient.

The artist works with a similar visually enticing effect in her installation Terrarium (2022), which she developed for the main exhibition The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Biennale di Venezia and consists of four semi-transparent fabric panels (Sunset Horizon) and three Hour Glass sculptures. Terrarium explores different uses of natural resources, in this case quartz sand for making glass or shale oil and gas extraction through fracking. The Hour Glasses exhibit their own material, evoking the long iconography of the hour glass as a vanitas symbol of human life and transferring this idea of finitude to the state of our planet, to the way its inhabitants deal with raw materials and nature, and thus to the Capitalocene, a sharpened reading of the Anthropocene.

Especially for her exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Kapwani Kiwanga has developed an eight-meter-wide wall piece made of shade cloth. The variably colored fabric nets that Kapwani Kiwanga uses to develop her so-called shade cloth works as wall objects, expansive installations, and sculptural screens are actually used in industrial agriculture to allow plants to thrive better or outside of their original habitat. Metaphorically, the nets with their shading properties can stand for European colonial projects in which ecosystems in the colonies were reshaped to either better suit European ecosystems or to facilitate regional mass cultivation with high yield increases.

The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive bilingual publication (German/English), edited by Uta Ruhkamp, with installation views of the exhibition, archival material, a conversation between Cecilia Alemani and Kapwani Kiwanga, and essays by Julie Pellegrin and Uta Ruhkamp.

Kapwani Kiwanga. The Length of the Horizon is being realized in cooperation with Copenhagen Contemporary, where it will subsequently be on view from January 25, 2024.

Curator: Uta Ruhkamp

Curatorial Assistants: Veronika Mehlhart, Dino Steinhof

KUNSTMUSEUM WOLSBURG

Hollerplatz 1 - 38440 Wolfsburg

www.kunstmuseum.de

Now Is The Time: 25 Years Collection Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

Now Is The Time
25 Years Collection Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Through 29 September 2019

The poster motif for the exhibition Now Is The Time features an infectiously cheerful smile. It is the smile of a masked face that a craftsman for sacred masks in the Indian coastal region of Konkan had designed as a profane but personal motif and with which he now presents himself to the camera, sitting on a bicycle wheel along the side of the road. In doing so, he responded to a request from the Indian conceptual artist Gauri Gill addressed to the villagers that, instead of traditional motifs, their own states of mind between dream and reality should become the theme. The photograph of the person wearing the mask, who plays his own role here, is one of many new acquisitions to be seen in the exhibition which celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the collection and embodies its current thematic orientation.

In 1994, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg was founded with the goal of developing a literally outstanding collection. Now Is The Time: The programmatic title is derived from Michel Majerus’ equally programmatic work “What looks good today may not look good tomorrow” (1999) in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.

After twenty-five exciting years the time has come to take the most comprehensive look at the collection to date. With more than 600 installations, groups of works, and individual pieces by one hundred artists, the collection now enjoys an international reputation and lends the industrial city of Wolfsburg a far-reaching aura as a cultural beacon.

Works by seventy-nine international artists can be (re-)discovered in dialogical or thematic contexts on all the newly renovated exhibition levels of the museum. The spectrum ranges from the earliest acquisitions to recently acquired works that either tie in with existing themes or take on new directions.

Now Is The Time offers a dialog between works of late modernism and more recent positions, up to and including representatives of global art. Thus, at the beginning of the exhibition, two works are juxtaposed in an exemplary manner: Jörg Immendorff’s commentary, painted on a large canvas, on the opening of the inner-German border in 1989, “Kleine Reise (Hasensülze)” (1990), in which Marcel Duchamp takes center stage, and the commentaries of Firelei Báez from the Dominican Republic, painted on fifty-eight separate pages, which address the legacy of the colonial period and thus simultaneously refer to her own origin and identity (2018).

A look back to the future: Caesuras and developments in art history over the last forty years are presented, as well as the diversity and simultaneity of artistic production. The collection began at a time when the globalization of art was only just beginning to develop. The building up of the collection thus took place in particular against the background of rapid visualization and medialization, the rise of the much quoted “flood of images,” which was reflected by the new art and becomes tangible with the works on view.

The key year of the collection is 1968.

Almost all the works were created after this epoch-making turning point in contemporary history. In the exhibition, the spectrum ranges from works not shown for quite some time to the most recent acquisitions: from Franz Ackermann via Christian Boltanski and Elizabeth Peyton to Fiona Tan, and Thomas Zipp. In recent years, it has been possible to once again substantially expand the collection—above all with global, female, and political positions—especially thanks to the support of donations from private individuals and the Circle of Friends of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.

The Artists

Franz Ackermann, Carl Andre, Nobuyoshi Araki, John M Armleder, Katie Armstrong, Richard Artschwager, Awst & Walther, Caroline Bachmann & Stefan Banz, Firelei Báez, Richard Billingham, Christian Boltanski, Stanley Brouwn, Jan de Cock, Tony Cragg, René Daniëls, Jan Dibbets, Burhan Doğançay, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, Sandra Gamarra, Gilbert & George, Gauri Gill, Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon, Andreas Gursky, Brian Harte, Eberhard Havekost, Jeppe Hein, Georg Herold, Gary Hill, Rebecca Horn, Pieter Hugo, Jörg Immendorff, Christian Jankowski, Sergej Jensen, Anselm Kiefer, In Sook Kim, Imi Knoebel, Gert Jan Kocken, Ola Kolehmainen, Jeff Koons, Jannis Kounellis, Pia Linz, Sharon Lockhart, Michel Majerus, Joseph Marioni, Rémy Markowitsch, Maix Mayer, Gerhard Merz, Mario Merz, Radenko Milak, Sarah Morris, Maurizio Nannucci, Bruce Nauman, Julian Opie, Nam June Paik, Verner Panton, Elizabeth Peyton, Daniel Pflumm, Otto Piene, Julius Popp, Prajakta Potnis, Neo Rauch, Thomas Schütte, Mithu Sen, Cindy Sherman, Beat Streuli, Philip Taaffe, Fiona Tan, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Mette Tronvoll, Luc Tuymans, Mariana Vassileva, Jeff Wall, James Welling, Tim Wolff, Erwin Wurm, Thomas Zipp.

Now Is The Time: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. The Collectione

Exhibition Catalogue

HATJE CANTZ, 2019

The Catalog To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, a comprehensive catalog with works by all the artists represented in the collection was published by Hatje Cantz. In addition to a foreword by Andreas Beitin and an introductory essay by Holger Broeker, texts by 97 international authors pay homage to the works in the collection (510 pages, 825 illustrations), separate English and German versions, 48,- € in the museum shop.

KUNSTMUSEUM WOLFSBURG
Hollerplatz 1 - 38440 Wolfsburg
www.kunstmuseum-wolfsburg.de