GRADA KILOMBA

A self-taught artist, Grada Kilomba completed her academic studies in psychoanalysis at the Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada in her home city of Lisbon. While working at the psychiatry department in her alma mater, she developed her ongoing passion for writing and visual storytelling. In her interview with SCHIRN MAG in 2018, Kilomba identified the common ground between art and psychoanalysis as the unconscious, noting that ‘art evolves when you explore very deep down in this iceberg and leave the conscious.’

Grada Kilomba’s artworks challenge the construction of official narratives, revealing the power imbalance between the privilege to forget and the necessity to remember. Language often becomes the tool through which she reinterprets established meanings or gives voice to previously marginalised people. The video projection The Desire Project (2015–2016), for example, consists entirely of written words, while The Dictionary (2017), another video work, reconsiders the overlapping and colliding definitions of ‘denial’, ‘guilt’, ‘recognition’, ‘reparation’, and ‘shame’.

Also central to Grada Kilomba’s art is the unresolved legacy of colonialism in today’s world. The staged readings of her book Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism (2008) at such venues as the Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Berlin (2013), and her solo exhibition Secrets to Tell, The Power Plant, Toronto (2018), present short, psychoanalytical accounts of everyday racism.

In the installation Table of Goods (2017), Kilomba builds a mound out of soil, coffee, cocoa, chocolate, and sugar, as well as a ring of wax candles, in reference to both the historical exploitation of African people and the inseparable relationship between that colonial past and the present.

Grada Kilomba retells well-known Greco-Roman myths in ‘Illusions’ (2016–2019), a three-part performance series that evaluates the current discourses surrounding political invisibility, collective memory and trauma, and postcolonial narratives. Appearing as a griot—a storyteller, musician, poet, and praise-singer in West African culture—throughout the series, the artist also relocates the main stage of storytelling from a dominantly Western, white perspective to an African alternative.

Recognised for its astute portrayal of the successes and struggles of a postcolonial society, ‘Illusions’ has been exhibited in prestigious international events. Illusions Vol. I, Narcissus and Echo (2017), originally commissioned for the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, was screened at the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2020; Illusions Vol. II, Oedipus (2018) was commissioned for the 10th Berlin Biennale; and Illusions Vol. III, Antigone (2019) premiered at Kilomba’s solo exhibition A World of Illusions, Bildmuseet, Umeå (2019) alongside the other two works in the trilogy.

Grada Kilomba solo exhibitions

Heroines, Birds and Monsters, Online only exhibition, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2020). Grada Kilomba: Poetic Disobediences, Pinacoteca, São Paulo (2019); Speaking the Unspeakable, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2018).

Grada Kilomba group exhibitions

10th Berlin Biennale (2018); DO SILÊNCIO À MEMÓRIA, Paço das Artes, São Paulo (2018); Documenta 14, Kassel (2017); 32^nd Bienal de São Paulo (2016).

Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2020