Exhibition Review: Kapawani Kiwanga: Safe Passage

Abstract

Book Review| June 02 2019 Exhibition Review: Kapawani Kiwanga: Safe Passage Kapawani Kiwanga: Safe Passage: MIT List Visual Arts Center. Cambridge, Massachusetts: February 8–April 21, 2019. James Cunning Holland James Cunning Holland James Cunning Holland, a visual artist and writer, teaches digital and performance art at Eastern Connecticut State University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar James Cunning Holland, a visual artist and writer, teaches digital and performance art at Eastern Connecticut State University. Afterimage (2019) 46 (2): 75–80. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2019.462009 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation James Cunning Holland; Exhibition Review: Kapawani Kiwanga: Safe Passage. Afterimage 2 June 2019; 46 (2): 75–80. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2019.462009 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search Kapawani Kiwanga’s solo show Safe Passage was a superimposed arrangement of four sculptural works that at first seemed to echo the Minimalist oeuvre. In time, however, a different impression unfolded, and the works soon revealed themselves as repositories of complex and nuanced meaning. By degrees, an underscore built, thematically unifying the four pieces, which revealed Kiwanga’s approach for what it is: an expedition into forgotten and marginalized histories to expose what poet Claudia Rankine has called “the buildup of erasure” that is so common to lives ravaged by racism.2 “At the core of the exhibition,” the wall text read, “is an engagement with racialized surveillance and the systems used in monitoring and controlling the movement of bodies in space.” Kiwanga thus animated her selected materials with the content of forgotten history, and while the four pieces in Safe Passage share a strongly formalist approach, the historical narrative and archival... You do not currently have access to this content.