Heroines, Birds and Monsters is the first solo exhibition of Grada Kilomba in the United States, presenting her unique form of storytelling. Working with theory, performance, film, and literature, Kilomba reveals the narratives of the colonial past, giving space to the silenced voices whose traumas are ever present. In her own words: “What if history has not been told properly? What if our history is haunted by cyclical violence precisely because it has not been buried properly?“

Kilomba’s work is showcased across Amant’s buildings, transforming them into a theater stage where characters, gestures, words, sounds and props unfold into a hybrid body, exchanging roles and staging a new dramaturgy that traverses geographies and temporalities.

Heroines, Birds and Monsters is an exhibition that applies a new poetic, theoretical, and political framework to the colonial past, and the ways by which these narratives continue to embed themselves. "Retelling history anew and properly is a necessary ceremony, a political act. Otherwise, history becomes haunted. It repeats itself. It returns intrusively, as fragmented knowledge, interrupting and assaulting our present lives.” –Grada Kilomba.

This exhibition is produced by Amant in partnership with Goethe Institute.Photo: Heroines, Birds and Monsters series, Sphinx, Act I, 2020

Grada Kilomba (born 1968, Lisbon, Portugal) lives and works in Berlin. Her work draws on memory, trauma, and post-colonialism. Best known for her subversive writing and poetic imagery, Kilomba gives voice, body, and image to her own writings—what she describes as performing knowledge. “What stories are told? How are they told? And told by whom?” are persistent questions in Kilomba’s body of work, explored through performance, staged reading, theater, choreography, video, photography, and installation. aris (2019); and Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea (PAC), Milan (2019), among others.