Kapwani Kiwanga

Kapwani Kiwanga
Canopy, 2023
Handmade ceramic tiles, acrylic paint, rope, metal profile, and wooden frame
165 × 125 × 10 cm
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection

Kapwani Kiwanga’s practice is grounded in deep research, bringing to light suppressed histories and the systemic structures that shape contemporary realities. Canopy belongs to a series of works that explore the elemental processes of world-building—how knowledge, identity, and cosmology are both materially and conceptually constructed.

Originally conceived for her first solo exhibition in Portugal at the Serralves Museum, Canopy is composed of handmade Portuguese ceramic tiles arranged in a precise, rhythmic grid. The restrained palette—predominantly white interspersed with varied shades of green—evokes minimalist abstraction while alluding to systems of data visualization, topographic mapping, and architectural planning. A curved line arcs gently across the composition, drawing on the ellipse as a fundamental geometric form and suggesting a meeting point between intersecting fields—visible and invisible, material and immaterial.

Kiwanga incorporates cotton thread, twisted into rope, as a reference to the colonial economy. In maritime Portugal, rope was traditionally made from hemp linen, yet cotton quickly became one of the most coveted commodities in colonial trade. Here, the fibre is transformed through ancestral techniques into a tactile element that speaks to both craft and capital. Cotton was not only central to trade routes and economies of exploitation but also laid the groundwork for the industrial textile revolution in Europe. By embedding this material into her work, Kiwanga points to the entangled histories of extraction, labour, and knowledge transmission.

For Kiwanga, clay is both materially grounded and symbolically charged—a substance that ties humans to the Earth and recurs in creation myths as the source of life itself. In Canopy, the ceramics function as a kind of material witness, holding layers of cultural and geopolitical sediment. The use of Portuguese tiles, in particular, reflects a history of craft, commerce, and empire, anchoring the work in a specific social and economic context while opening it up to broader cosmological inquiry.

The titles of the series—Magma, Rift, Cascade, Dune, Canopy, Astres—evoke geological, ecological, and celestial forces. They gesture toward imagined cosmogonies and shifting worldviews, suggesting that the construction of reality is as much an aesthetic and symbolic act as it is a political one. Through the interplay of glaze, thread, rope, and earth, Kiwanga invites viewers to consider alternative narratives—those inscribed in materials, in bodies, and in the very ground beneath our feet.