Kapwani Kiwanga

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Image courtesy of Fundació Joan Miró

Kapwani Kiwanga creates a compelling internal architecture that explores the materiality, economic exchanges and geological temporalities that shape our relationship with spaces.

Conceived specifically for the Fundació Joan Miró, the exhibition offers a comprehensive examination of her research into design, space, control and identity, providing new perspectives from which to view architecture and its power structures through a radically contemporary lens.

Although Kiwanga was not selected for explicit architectural affiliations, her work demonstrates an internal architecture of exceptional precision and coherence. Her rigorously structured practice engages organically with architecture as she explores materiality, resource flows, exchange economies and the power systems that organize territories and bodies. Drawing on research into architectural design and material circulation systems, her recent work has expanded toward transhuman temporalities such as geology, allowing spaces and systems to be understood on scales beyond human time.

Trained as an anthropologist and working internationally as an artist, Kiwanga has produced a body of work that employs formally refined installations to unsettle hegemonic narratives and interrogate the relationships between power, architecture, territory and identity. 

The exhibition brings together a selection of existing works alongside a significant number of new pieces produced specifically for the Barcelona presentation. It explores three principal areas: materiality and systems of exploitation, economic exchanges and their structural tensions and contemporary territorial crises ranging from agricultural exploitation to housing. Together, these themes reinforce the architectural reading that runs throughout this year’s programme, positioning Kiwanga’s work as a critical space from which to reconsider how the world we inhabit is constructed and controlled.

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