Grada Kilomba works with image and text, using the spoken and written word through staged readings, performances, installations, and videos. Giving voice to those who have been silenced throughout history, she addresses gender and race issues in the context of current debates on colonialism and post-colonialism. Kilomba´s research focus on the ambiguous relationship between remembering and forgetting as well as the collective memory and identity of Africans living in Diaspora.
For her first exhibition in the US, Grada Kilomba presents a series of projects developed over the past few years. She conveys historical individuals, fictional characters, tangible facts, and mythical stories to reveal the connective pathways between witnesses and narrators. Especially relevant for this exhibition is her video trilogy (Word of Illusions I, II, and III), in which the artist approaches Greek myths to explore the politics of invisibility, questioning the notion of “whiteness” as an imperative component in the postcolonial world. The exhibition also features a version of the staged reading of Kilomba’s book Plantation Memories (2008), a compilation of episodes of everyday racism written as testimonials.
We would like to thank the Goethe-Institut for their generous contribution.
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.
Exhibition Guide and Spanish Translations
