Venice 2024
Kiluanji Kia Henda | Venice 2024 | Works
Kiluanji Kia Henda
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Watch our film spotlighting Kiluanji Kia Henda at Venice featuring RA’s Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Tarini Malik
The Geometric Ballad of Fear (Sardegna)
This is a series of nine photographs of idyllic landscapes on the Sardinian coast, between stacks, wild vegetation and the open sea. However, each photograph was superimposed on the structure of a grid, evocative of metal barriers of protection and repentance. The landscape scenarios, already anesthetized by the choice of black and white, appear inaccessible and forced to a forced distance, as if they were observed through a security barrier. The work evokes the walls and borders, physical and legal, with which the European continent has equipped itself in response to the arrival of migratory flows in recent years and which have transformed the arrival towards the European coasts into a trap, a geometry fear of a militarized continent.
The Geometric Ballad of Fear (1), 2019
Inkjet print on fine art paper
Work: 100 x 120 cm
Edition of 5
The Geometric Ballad of Fear (2), 2019
Inkjet print on fine art paper
Work: 100 x 120 cm
Edition of 5
The Geometric Ballad of Fear (3), 2019
Inkjet print on fine art paper
Work: 100 x 120 cm
Edition of 5
The Geometric Ballad of Fear (4), 2019
Inkjet print on fine art paper
Work: 100 x 120 cm
Edition of 5
The Geometric Ballad of Fear (5), 2019
Inkjet print on fine art paper
Work: 100 x 120 cm
Edition of 5
The Geometric Ballad of Fear (6), 2019
Inkjet print on fine art paper
Work: 100 x 120 cm
Edition of 5
The Geometric Ballad of Fear (7), 2019
Inkjet print on fine art paper
Work: 100 x 120 cm
Edition of 5
The Geometric Ballad of Fear (8), 2019
Inkjet print on fine art paper
Work: 100 x 120 cm
Edition of 5
The Geometric Ballad of Fear (9), 2019
Inkjet print on fine art paper
Work: 100 x 120 cm
Edition of 5
Kiluanji Kia Henda (b. 1979, Luanda, Angola) employs a surprising sense of humour in his work, which often homes in on themes of identity, politics, and perceptions of post-colonialism and modernism in Africa. Kia Henda brings a critical edge to his multidisciplinary practice, which incorporates photography, video, and performance. Informed by a background surrounded by photography enthusiasts, Kia Henda’s conceptual-based work has further been sharpened by exposure to music, avant-garde theatre, and collaborations with a collective of emerging artists in Luanda’s art scene. Much of Kia Henda’s work draws on history through the appropriation and manipulation of public spaces and structures, and the different representations that form part of collective memory, in order to produce complex, yet powerful imagery.
Kia Henda has had solo exhibitions in galleries and institutions around the world. His work has featured on biennales in Venice, Dakar, São Paulo and Gwangju as well as major travelling exhibitions such as Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design and The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Hell, Purgatory revisited by Contemporary African Artists. In 2019, Kia Henda’s work was acquired by Tate Modern in London, and he was selected to participate on the Unlimited sector at Art Basel. In 2020, Kia Kenda exhibited at the MAN Museo d’Arte Provincia di Nuoro in Italy, marking his first solo exhibition in a major European museum.
Kia Henda currently lives and works between Luanda and Lisbon.