Kapwani Kiwanga | Trinket | Venice 2024

Kapwani Kiwanga has transformed the Canada Pavilion by way of a site-specific sculptural installation. She invites visitors into an immersive environment through an ambitious intervention on the building’s interior and exterior. Viewed from its facade, the building becomes a large-scale tableau: three-dimensional space collapses into a two-dimensional plane where distinctions between inside and outside dissolve through transparency, layering and transgressing of the building’s original boundaries. Kiwanga’s work is anything but static: as one moves through the coil-like architecture, it unfolds, multiplying the visitors’ perspectives.

The principal material employed in the installation consists of conterie, also known as seed beads. Conterie were dispersed from Murano in the Venetian archipelago and incorporated into various material cultures throughout the world. Historically employed as both currency and items of exchange, these tiny glass units are used by Kiwanga to deftly construct the monumental out of the minute. The same seed bead could be considered as an archive or a witness to past transactions that indelibly transformed the socioeconomic landscape of the 16th century and beyond.

Kiwanga is concerned with how diverse forms of power are manifested, how the histories they suppress are often overlooked, and the effect they have on everyday life. Her multidisciplinary works function as experiential archives that offer temporary ruptures in established conventions, allowing audiences to both experience and imagine alternative ways of relating and being. This installation addresses the often-destructive history of commerce, yet the work pushes further and asks one to consider how the trade of these beads for varied materials shaped the current world.

Other materials are integrated in nearly raw states within the exhibition space. Kiwanga selected these specific elements after researching transoceanic trade involving conterie. Rising from the floor onto the walls and spilling out into the courtyard, these materials emerge to encounter the beads. The meeting of these distinct materials with the beads formalizes a place of exchange, asking one to reflect on questions of inherent value, aesthetics, and the complexity of global economic relations.