Torkwase Dyson

Torkwase Dyson transforms the ground floor of Kunsthaus Bregenz into the setting of a space-filling architectural sculptural intervention. Two enormous black, sail-shaped elements divide Peter Zumthor’s hall-like architecture. One floats suspended between the ceiling and the floor; the other, a steep triangle, nearly touches the floor with its tip and extends through the ceiling into the floor above–at turns suggesting an elegant wedge, a plunging blade, or a monumental lapel. Made of black wood, the sculpture seems to soar upward as light as a feather and strikingly divides the ground floor, like a barrier.

These forms, which Dyson calls “hypershapes,” are rooted in the theory of Black Compositional Thought. They are an expression of the self-determined emancipation of Black people from the geography of North America, shaped by slavery and extending into the present. The presence of the sculptures sharpens our sense of the position of our own body in space. They raise questions about perception, sound, and proportions. This gives rise to a striking spatial poetry in which distances and movements, gazes and obstructions, as well as notions of mass, scale, and distance, become tangible.

Originally from Chicago, Dyson studied sociology and painting and now lives in Upstate New York. Her work encompasses various forms of artistic expression. She creates pieces that combine sculpture, architecture, drawing, and painting, addressing themes such as infrastructure, ecology, the flow of capital, migration, history, and the future.

Her reflections on Black Geographies form the basis of her artistic practice. Rather than viewing geography as a neutral, physically given order, Dyson considers it an amalgamation of self-invention, social power relations, historical processes, and political decisions. Spaces are never simply given. They are planned, occupied, regulated, and appropriated. They are always imbued with complex issues of ownership, belonging, exclusion, beauty, texture, and improvisation. In this way, Dyson shifts the question “What is a space?” from a physical definition to one that lends it a historical and deeply humanistic perspective. What does it mean to be able to inhabit a space? Who is permitted to occupy or invent which spaces, who can move freely through their elevations, and who is controlled, restricted, or excluded? And how do slavery, colonialism, and capitalism continue to be refused by environmental liberation, autonomous social orders and democracy? Of particular significance here is the question of how Black people transhistorically perceive, use, transform, and invent space of freedom at many scales.

The monumental poplar plywood sculptures at Kunsthaus Bregenz have been crafted specifically for this exhibition in the Bregenzerwald region. In a process that lasts several days, Dyson stains the wood with a black glaze. This results in the material becoming internally saturated. The absorption of the glaze underpainting becomes a form of inscription into the material. Dyson then, in an additive process, begins making distilled painting and drawing marks on the volume. These are what she considers notations on space informed by such things as meditative walking, mapping ancient stars, and memory.

The same technique is also evident in Dyson’s contribution to the Venice Biennale in 2026. In a hall at the Arsenale, she has grouped monumental black sculptures that suggest disk segments, their cut surfaces accentuated by colored glass. Here, too, the focus is not on geometry as an autonomous form. Rather, the sculptures create connections between light and matter, body and space, movement and boundary, and interior and exterior.

The second floor of Kunsthaus Bregenz is completely darkened. A stop-motion animation and soundscape expand the space. Much like architecture, acoustics are a form of spatial inscription. Although sound has no clearly defined material form, it possesses volume, duration, and direction. It flows through the room, filling empty spaces and making gaps perceptible. Presented on one of the walls are thirty-four small canvases, constituting the score for the soundscape. Like all the other paintings in the exhibition, they were created specifically for the architecture of Kunsthaus Bregenz and are on view here for the first time. Together the paintings, animation and score speak to the improvisations and the value of what the artist refers to as the freedom of indeterminacy.

In the unique natural light on the top floor, several largescale paintings unfold their special intensity and luminosity. They are elegant, elegiac compositions. In them, abstract elements and linear structures, reminiscent of pairs of compasses or needles, seem to float in fluid surroundings. In shades of night blue or black, they are accentuated by geometric patterns and brushstrokes. In fact, according to Dyson, they are abstractions referencing waterways and infrastructures that have been sites of colonial trauma as well as spaces of invention and liberation.

The KUB exhibition is the first solo presentation of Torkwase Dyson's work in Austria.

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