Overview
“What would the bottom of the ocean tell us tomorrow, if emptied of water today?”
Artist, author and thinker Grada Kilomba (b. Lisbon, 1968; lives and works in
Berlin)
mastered a unique practice of storytelling. Her work is often described
as “a new
postcolonial minimalism”. Using performance, choreography, video, large
scale sculptural and sonic installations Kilomba blurs form, image and
movement and therefore
the boundaries between the disciplines she is familiar with.
Opera to a Black Venus makes reference to the Black history of resilience and resistance, and is dedicated to the
entanglement between ecological collapse and colonial
injustice.
The new commissioned works Opera to a Black Venus (2024), a large-scale video installation, and Labyrinth (2024), a site-specific spatial installation, are at the center of the publication accompanying the exhibition. The authors Denise Ferreira da Silva, University of British Columbia, Vancouver; Tamsin Hong, Serpentine Gallery, London; and Ashish Ghadiali, Radical Ecology & Black Atlantic, London, as well as Çağla Ilk and Misal Adnan Yıldız categorize Kilomba's work along her subversive stories of memory and resilience.
