86953.03_lg
Online

Grada Kilomba

Heroines, Birds, and Monsters

This online exhibition of photographic work created by Grada Kilomba in 2020 is presented in concert with 18 Verses, Kilomba’s first exhibition with Pace, on view at the gallery’s flagship in New York from May 12 through July 1. Both exhibitions are organized in collaboration with Goodman Gallery. This focused digital presentation features a suite of images, evocatively titled Heroines, Birds and Monsters, that captures the characters and stories from Kilomba’s video trilogy, A World of Illusions (2017-19). Setting her scenes in an unidentifiable, empty space, Kilomba reenacts universal myths from a new perspective, redefining what the human condition is.

Working across various disciplines—from performance, sound, and staged readings to video and sculptural installations—Kilomba’s work interrogates notions of memory, trauma, gender, and identity in the post-colonial moment. At the core of her work is a practice of decolonial storytelling. Kilomba’s urgent questioning, subverting, and reimagining of stories deemed “universal” are acts of a continuous process of unlearning. Through her distinctive visual lexicon, Kilomba endeavors to dismantle the dominant structures of knowledge production.

Grada Kilomba, Heroines, Birds and Monsters series, Creon and Haemon Act III, 2020, archival pigment print on cotton paper mounted on aluDibond, 39-3/8" × 59-1/16" (100 cm × 150 cm), image, paper and mount 40" × 60" (101.6 cm × 152.4 cm), frame
What if history has not
been told properly?
What if only some characters
have been revealed as part
of its narrative?
What if the ghosts of the past
are spirits that are doomed
to wander precisely because
their stories have not been told?
And what if our history is haunted,
by cyclical violence
precisely because it has not been buried properly?

Excerpt from Grada Kilomba, Illusions Vol. III, Antigone (2019)

Grada Kilomba, Heroines, Birds and Monsters series, Creon Act II, 2020, archival pigment print on cotton paper, 39-3/8" × 59-1/16" (100 cm × 150 cm), image, paper and mount 40" × 60" (101.6 cm × 152.4 cm), frame
Grada Kilomba, Heroines, Birds and Monsters series, Creon Act III, 2020, archival pigment print on cotton paper, 39-3/8" × 59-1/16" (100 cm × 150 cm), image, paper and mount 40" × 60" (101.6 cm × 152.4 cm), frame

In this photographic series, Kilomba poetically captures the complexities of the well-known Greek mythological characters Oedipus and Antigone. Staged in a white cube, the characters inhabit a futuristic matrix where past, present, and future exist in a space of timelessness, rupturing colonial concepts of linearity and neutrality. Kilomba subverts the classical narrative while working with an ensemble of Black actors, who give body to stories of political, ethical, and metaphorical conflicts. By staging Blackness at the center of storytelling, Kilomba explores untried dimensions of ever-known narratives, posing new questions to create other configurations, visualities, and spaces.

Grada Kilomba, Heroines, Birds and Monsters series, Sphinx Act I, 2020, archival pigment print on cotton paper mounted on aluDibond, 39-3/8" × 59-1/16" (100 cm × 150 cm), image, paper and mount 40-3/16" × 60" (102.1 cm × 152.4 cm), frame
Grada Kilomba, Heroines, Birds and Monsters series, Sphinx Act II, 2020, archival pigment print on cotton paper mounted on aluDibond, 39-3/8" × 59-1/16" (100 cm × 150 cm), image, paper and mount 40" × 60" (101.6 cm × 152.4 cm), frame
Grada Kilomba, Heroines, Birds and Monsters series, Sphinx Act III, 2020, archival pigment print on cotton paper mounted on aluDibond, 39-3/8" × 59-1/16" (100 cm × 150 cm), image, paper and mount 40" × 60" (101.6 cm × 152.4 cm), frame

“I wanted to go to these myths—which are delivered as universal human knowledge—and read them through my eyes, through my gaze, and in that sense make a translation from what the myth is into the postcolonial society,” Kilomba explains.

At times alone or in dialogue with one another, Kilomba’s characters embody the complex politics of misrepresentation, erasure, and violence. Her reenactment of the myth of Antigone brings forth the debate about how we treat the wounds of history. In Kilomba’s view, Antigone’s determination to give her brother a proper burial embodies the importance of properly acknowledging past atrocities. Kilomba’s Antigone examines the significance of performance and ritual as spaces for memory and recognition.

Grada Kilomba, Heroines, Birds and Monsters series, Antigone Act I, 2020, archival pigment print on cotton paper mounted on aluDibond, 39-3/8" × 59-1/16" (100 cm × 150 cm), image, paper and mount 40" × 60" (101.6 cm × 152.4 cm), frame
Grada Kilomba, Heroines, Birds and Monsters series, Antigone Act II, 2020, archival pigment print on cotton paper mounted on aluDibond, 39-3/8" × 59-1/16" (100 cm × 150 cm), image, paper and mount 40" × 60" (101.6 cm × 152.4 cm), frame
Grada Kilomba, Heroines, Birds and Monsters series, Antigone Act III, 2020, archival pigment print on cotton paper mounted on aluDibond, 39-3/8" × 59-1/16" (100 cm × 150 cm), image, paper and mount 40" × 60" (101.6 cm × 152.4 cm), frame
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.

Excerpt from Grada Kilomba, Illusions Vol. III, Antigone (2019)

To learn more or inquire about the works in this exhibition, email inquiries@pacegallery.com.

Journal

View All
  • Past, Grada Kilomba, Heroines, Birds, and Monsters, May 10, 2023