Kapwani Kiwanga: Shifting States at Fundación Miró in Barcelona

The first national retrospective of Kapwani Kiwanga, winner of the 2025 Joan Miró Prize, opens on April 29. Curated by Martina Millà, Head of exhibitions at Fundació Joan Miró and conceived specifically for the Fundació Joan Miró, the exhibition proposes a compelling internal architecture through which the artist explores materiality, economic exchange, and geological temporalities that shape our relationship with space.

The project reflects Kiwanga’s ongoing research into space and its mechanisms of control, offering new perspectives from which to rethink architecture and its power structures through a radically contemporary lens. Her artistic practice engages organically with architecture: through it, she examines materiality, resource flows, systems of exchange, and the power dynamics that organize territories and bodies.

Building on her research into architectural structures and systems of material circulation, in recent years the artist has expanded her focus toward transhuman temporalities—such as geology—enabling an understanding of spaces and systems across scales that exceed human time.

Trained as an anthropologist and with an established international career, Kiwanga creates formally precise installations that deconstruct hegemonic narratives while analyzing the relationships between power, architecture, territory, and the body. The Joan Miró Prize jury highlighted her ability to translate complex historical and social processes into poetic and conceptually rigorous forms, capable of engaging in a profound dialogue with Miró’s radicalism and Sert’s architecture.

The exhibition brings together a selection of existing works alongside a significant group of new productions created specifically for the Barcelona presentation, in collaboration with TBA21. The exhibition is structured around three main axes: materiality; economic and cultural exchanges, together with their structural tensions; and contemporary crises related to territory, from agriculture to housing.

Taken together, these themes are embedded in the architectural framework that runs through the Fundació Miró’s program this year, positioning Kiwanga’s work as a space from which to reconsider how the world we inhabit is constructed.