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Grada Kilomba | Public Installation | MAAT Lisbon, Portugal

O Barco/The Boat is an installation by artist Grada Kilomba, composed of 140 blocks which form the silhouette of the bottom of a ship and carefully draw the space created to accommodate the bodies of millions of Africans, enslaved by European empires. In the Western imaginary, a boat is easily associated with glory, freedom and maritime expansion, described as “discoveries” but, in the artist’s view, “a continent with millions of people cannot be discovered” nor “one of the longest and most horrendous chapters of humanity – Slavery – can be erased”.

This first large-scale installation by Grada Kilomba, which stretches 32 meters along the Tagus river, invites the audience to enter a garden of memory, in which poems rest on burnt wooden blocks, recalling forgotten stories and identities. What stories are told? Where are they told? How are they told? And told by whom? These are questions that arise when entering this installation.

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Kapwani Kiwanga | Solo Exhibition | The Moody Center for the Arts, Houston, USA

Kapwani Kiwanga: The Sand Recalls the Moon’s Shadow, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Houston, consists of two new site-specific installations and a video work. Focusing on aspects of two nations’ economies—the instrumental role the cultivation of sisal played in Tanzania’s independence and the impact of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in Texas—the installations, Maya-Bantu and Dune, reflect on processes of extraction and the exploitation of natural resources. Alongside these monumental commissions, the video piece Vumbi underscores the importance of human care for the environment, while concurrently grappling with nature’s inexorable forces.

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