Kapwani Kiwanga Makes a Petri Dish Out of Our World

For millennia, humans have operated according to two fundamental contradictions. Firstly, although we rely on nature for our very existence, it has the potential to harm and poison us. Secondly, despite our reliance upon it, we continually poison and harm the environment. In her first major survey exhibition in Canada, ‘Remediation’, Canadian-French artist Kapwani Kiwanga presents new and updated works from her multidisciplinary, research-driven practice that surface the political, social, economic and ecological complexities underlying our relationship with the natural world.

Kiwanga prompts us to consider both the explicit and implicit meanings of her multi-layered works, some of which directly implicate our experience of the exhibition space. Scorch (2023), for instance, comprises a large section of Japanese shou sugi ban flooring, created through a process that involves burning the wood to render it waterproof and deterioration-resistant. Walking over the floorboards as we enter the gallery gives us cause to reflect upon humanity’s simultaneous reliance on and (often politically motivated) abuse of the earth’s forests: the military’s scorched-earth policy, for instance, destroys anything of potential use to the enemy, while some natural ecosystems depend on controlled burning as a means of regeneration.

In Keyhole (2023), Kiwanga creates a large water-filtration system based on the raised-bed ‘keyhole’ garden designs found in Lesotho and other African countries. Using plants taken from the museum’s surroundings, the work includes pea gravel, LED grow lights and air pumps to clean water, demonstrating how plant life can restore environments. The history of the keyhole garden as an accessible food source for those who were otherwise too ill to tend the land during the AIDS crisis of the mid-1990s adds a geo-political dimension.

Glaze (2023) is a series of multicoloured Perspex window treatments carved into drywall. Rendered in both organic and inorganic geometric shapes, the translucent windows bathe the gallery in colourful light but block any clear outlook onto the world beyond, containing the viewer as if a specimen to be preserved and studied. Placed in conversation with the series ‘Vivarium’ (2020–23) – three sculptures made of steel and inflated PVC tubing – Glaze reminds us of Kiwanga’s ongoing interest in Wardian cases, early terraria used to transport and protect plant species. Here, however, as the exhibition booklet explains, the tubes surround and support the imagined plant life, rather than contain and control it.

In a striking work addressing the often-imperceptible ways in which economic imperatives lead to environmental degradation, Residue (2023) depicts a wall of dried banana leaves, forming what might be read as a large garden trellis. Through this seemingly innocuous intervention, Kiwanga highlights the history of colonization and, specifically, the use of chlordecone – a now-banned pesticide used to treat banana plants in the Caribbean and elsewhere, which has devastated local ecologies.

Two paper-flower sculptures, The Marias (2020), emulate peacock-flower plants, whose poison offered enslaved women the means of aborting children who would otherwise have been born into bondage. In employing the hobbyist papercraft techniques popular with affluent women in the 18th and 19th centuries – women whose life of leisurely pursuit was often enabled by the horrors of the slave trade – Kiwanga illuminates how our relationship to plant life is shaped by history, class, race and other social markers.

Vumbi (2012) – a video of the artist wiping rust-coloured dust naturally occurring on foliage in Tanzania, as if to beautify it – closes the show. On occasion, passers-by cross into the video’s frame, while street sounds from a nearby road sonically enfold the viewer into this natural scene. The video reinforces a poignant idea that runs throughout the show: humanity can coexist with nature through acts of care for the environment – but we also have the capacity to intervene negatively in natural processes, even in the name of aesthetics.  

Kapwani Kiwanga, ‘Remediation’, is on view at MOCA Toronto until 23 July. 

^{Main image: Kapwani Kiwanga, The Marias (detail), 2020. Courtesy: the artist; Galerie Poggi, Paris; Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin; and Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, Johannesburg, and London. © ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022); photograph: Kristien Daem.}