Kapwani Kiwanga: Linear

Galerie Tanja Wagner announce the second solo exhibition by Kapwani Kiwanga.

This exhibition Linear is part of a series, following Kiwanga’s solo shows at the Logan Center, Chicago and The Power Plant, Toronto earlier this year. The works reflect the artist’s research into disciplinary architecture, including schools, prisons, hospitals, and mental health facilities.

Central to the exhibition are paintings on sheets of drywall reflecting two-tone color palettes, used in institution’s interiors with an intented psychological effect. Kiwanga’s choice of color reflects social hygiene movements and hospital reforms at the turn of the 20th century as well as the work of Faber Birren. Birren developed a color theory which is applied to the conditions of work, learning, surveillance, healing, and care.

The linear division of the paintings evokes the separation of social groups and societal hierarchies with direct reference to historic sites of institutional control – such as the prison walls of a French penal colony of Guyana, operating rooms in San Francisco, a Canadian psychological hospital, or the workplace to improve performance, as in Chicago’s printing company RR Donnelley and Sons.

In addition to the paintings A Primer a silent video co-produced by the Logan Center and The Power Plant, is projected onto a constructed wall and shows a series of vignettes of architectural assemblages and objects in space. The camera movement animates three structures, all of which are painted in reference to different environments and times: the white Ripolin of Le Corbusier and the international movement in architecture as well as the widespread use of green in hospital and therapeutic settings to invoke nature’s healing powers, and the so-called Baker-Miller pink which was believed to calm agressive inmates in prisons in the late 1970s.

Kiwanga’s artistic gesture is a reminder that whenever constructs appear to contain control or separate bodies, subversion and resistance can emerge.

Opening: April 28, 6-9 pm

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Sunday April 30, 12 am
Artist talk with Kapwani Kiwanga and Denise Ryner, an independent curator based in Vancouver and Berlin. She is curently a visiting curatorial researcher in the Visual Arts and Film Department at Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

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www.tanjawagner.com

Kapwani Kiwanga’s solo exhibtion A wall is a wall at The Power Plant, Toronto is still on view until May 14.

Kapwani Kiwanga will also perform Afrogalactica at documenta (14) in Athens this June.