Kapwani Kiwanga — Cima Cima — Le Crédac, Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 27 → July 11, 2021

Kapwani Kiwanga — Le Crédac, Ivry Empruntant à l’histoire le titre de son exposition qui évoque les « cimarrones », ces fugitifs libérés de leur condition d’esclave ... 2 - Bien Critique

Kapwani Kiwanga (born in 1978 in Hamilton) is a Franco-Canadian artist-researcher. Her work focuses on narratives that outline asymmetries of power, highlighting the sometimes unexpected witnesses of these histories. Her visual arts practice seeks to give shape to dormant or unknown archives.

The exhibition title, Cima Cima, refers to “Cimarrons” or “Maroons”, terms of Arawak origin, which were included in Spanish language to refer to people living in conditions of slavery, who liberated themselves in the Americas. Once emancipated, these women and men implemented strategies to preserve their freedom. This included establishing precarious villages ready to be abandoned, sustenance agriculture allowing for their survival, and the cultivation of plants, brought along from their local land, to be adapted to a new environment.

Cima Cima thus raises the question of deliberately concealed actions allowing for survival. It addresses the history of forms of resistance, and the practice of creative unruliness as a way of ensuring freedom.

It is precisely the cultivation of plants and their role as witnesses of human history that interests the artist here, as well as their sometimes ambivalent function: the plant that nourishes, the plant that heals, but also the plant that kills either indirectly or deliberately as poison.

From April to June, a series of round tables will accompany the exhibition: Anne de Malleray in discussion with Noémie Sauve; Marcos Ávila Forero talks with Emanuele Coccia and Malcom Ferdinand; Kapwani Kiwanga and Claire Le Restif exchange on the exhibition. A meeting will also be organized by the newspaper AOC.

¹ List subject to change