artist

Grada Kilomba

Born in Lisbon / Portugal, 1968.
Lives and works in Berlin.

Grada Kilomba is an interdisciplinary artist, whose work draws on memory, trauma, gender and post-colonialism, interrogating concepts of knowledge, power and violence. “What stories are told? How are they told? And told by whom?” are constant questions in Kilomba’s body of work, to revise post-colonial narratives.

Illusions Vol. III, Antigone, 2019
Two channel video installation, sound, 54’ 35”, in loop

Kilomba subversively translates text into image, movement and installation, by giving body, voice and form to her own critical writing. Performance, staged reading, video, photography, publications and installation are a platform for Kilomba’s unique practice of storytelling, which intentionally disrupts the proverbial ‘white cube’ through a new and urgent decolonial language and imagery.

Exhibitions

  • Tudo o que eu quero – Artistas portuguesas
    1900-2020 (Travelling), 2021

    Bozar, Brussels, Belgium

  • Ubuntu, a Lucid Dream, 2021

    Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France

  • Espressioni, Castello Di Rivoli, 2021

    Museo D’Arte Contemporanea, Torino, Italy

  • While I Write

    Secession Museum, Vienna

  • O Barco/The Boat

    MAAT-Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon

  • Affective Utopia, 2019

    Kadist Art Foundation, Paris

  • Poetic Disobediences, 2019

    Pinacoteca de São Paulo

  • Documenta 14, Kassel

  • Secrets to Tell, 2018

    The Power Plant, Toronto

  • We don’t need another hero, 2018

    10th Berlin Biennale

  • Illusions Vol. I, Narcissus and Echo, 2017

    La Biennale de Lubumbashi VI

  • Incerteza Viva, 2017

    32. Bienal de São Paulo

 

 


Strongly influenced by the work of Frantz Fanon, Kilomba studied Freundian Psychoanalysis in Lisbon – at ISPA, and there she worked with war survivors from Angola and Mozambique. Early on she started writing and publishing stories, before extending her interests into staging, image, sound and movement.







In ‘A World of Illusions’, Grada Kilomba’s 6 channel video installation, the artist brings together her three acclaimed video works ‘Illusions Vol. I, Narcissus and Echo’, ‘Illusions Vol. II, Oedipus’ and ‘Illusions Vol.III, Antigone.’ In these works Kilomba re-stages three Greek myths, using storytelling, choreography and performance as a way in which to explore race and identity. The three videos are set up in the same format: a vertical screen is positioned in relation to a large video projection. On the vertical screens a video of Kilomba narrating the stories of Narcissus and Echo, Oedipus and Antigone plays. As the narrator, Kilomba takes on the role of a griot, an African historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet, or musician. The griot is also a repository of oral tradition.

The large projections show groups of black actors who enact the stories Kilomba narrates. The actors move and interact with each other but seem unable to escape from the vast white background of the films. In ‘Illusions Vol. I, Narcissus and Echo’, the subjects in the film climb ladders, walk in and out of the white void and even carry ‘red, white, blue bags’ suggesting that they have momentum and movement beyond the white void. However, this is beyond the structure of the vast whiteness of the stage. The actors seem trapped by the void, by western thought and colonial patriarchy, unable to fully escape it and at the same time minimised and stilted by it. As Kilomba states: “Narcissus becomes a metaphor for a society which has not resolved its colonial history and takes itself and its own image as the only objects of love.”

In ‘Illusions Vol.II, Oedipus’, Kilomba uses the myth of Oedipus to interrogate and bring to light what Lorna Hardwick describes as the “transformation of fissures in national, cultural and moral senses of identity in relation to post-colonial situations”. The work can also be interpreted as meditation on excess and tyranny, as well as an investigation into how the wounds of the past are masked by the present. Wounding is an important theme for Kilomba, throughout her practice, who states “colonialism is a wound that has never been properly treated, an infected wound that always hurts, and sometimes bleeds.’ A principal visual in the film is red ribbon, in which the subjects become bound and entangled, which serves as a metaphor for the wounds of history which will continue to haunt the present unless addressed and accounted for.

Illusions Vol. II, Oedipus, 2018
Two-channel video, HD, colour, sound






How we treat the wounds of history is brought to the fore in ‘Illusions Vol. III, Antigone.’ As Kilomba, as narrator, states “if history has not been told properly, and if only some of its characters have been revealed as part of the narrative then maybe we have a haunted history. What if our history is haunted by cyclical violence precisely because it has not been buried properly?” Antigone’s determination to give her brother a proper burial is used by Kilomba to embody the importance of properly acknowledging past atrocities even if it means fighting against violent systems of oppression which do not allow for it. Quoting Marianne McDonald, Wumi Raji writes “ Antigone is a ‘conscientious objector’, one who is often remembered when the need arises to tell an oppressive regime ‘that something is rotten in that particular state.” Kilomba’s Antigone stands as a protest against the systems of colonial oppression which continue into the present day and as an attestation against colonial amnesia. In the eyes of the artist, Antigone needs to bury her brother properly, because she needs to produce memory. Only through the burial and its rituals can her own history be remembered, and not forgotten. In “A World of Illusions Kilomba” has designed a triangular structure and each dual channel film plays on the respective sides of the triangle. This means that the films can be viewed and entered into at any point, destabilizing the assumed linearity of history and time.

against the systems of colonial oppression which continue into the present day and as an attestation against colonial amnesia. In the eyes of the artist, Antigone needs to bury her brother properly, because she needs to produce memory. Only through the burial and its rituals can her own history be remembered, and not forgotten. In “A World of Illusions Kilomba” has designed a triangular structure and each dual channel film plays on the respective sides of the triangle. This means that the films can be viewed and entered into at any point, destabilizing the assumed linearity of history and time.






Illusions Vol. I, Narcissus and Echo, 2017
Two-channel video installation, HD, colour, sound

Kilomba holds a distinguished Doctorate in Philosophy from the Freie Universität Berlin. She has lectured at several international universities, such as the University of Ghana and the Vienna University of Arts, and was a Guest Professor at the Humboldt Universität Berlin, Department of Gender Studies. For several years, she was a guest artist at the Maxim Gorki Theatre, in Berlin, developing Kosmos 2, a political intervention with refugee artists. She is the author of the acclaimed “Plantation Memories” (Unrast, 2008) a compilation of episodes of everyday racism written in the form of short psychoanalytical stories. Her book has been translated into several languages, and was listed as the most important non-fiction literature in Brazil, 2019.