Grada Kilomba: Opera to a Black Venus

The Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden presents the first comprehensive institutional solo exhibition in Germany by the internationally renowned artist, author, and thinker Grada Kilomba with an engrossing question: “What would the bottom of the ocean tell us tomorrow, if emptied of water today?” Her work has been described as a new postcolonial minimalism, in which form, image and movement blurs the boundaries between disciplines. Borrowing the title from the new commission, Opera to a Black Venus, the exhibition revisits the Black history of resistance to examine the entanglement between ecological collapse and colonial injustice.

At the heart of the exhibition is Opera to a Black Venus (2024), a large-scale video installation and Labyrinth (2024), a site specific spatial installation, both presented for the first time to the public. In Opera to a Black Venus, Kilomba stages a contemporary opera dedicated to a Black Venus, who inhabits the bottom of the sea and becomes the oracle of stories about memory and resilience. In a futuristic scenario, a desolate landscape reveals the archaeology of human existence. Kilomba has created a unique ensemble, with singers as well as percussionists and ballet dancers using the boat as a metaphor to the politics of violence. Experimenting with forms of storytelling, she frames the show around the opera genre, hailed as the paramount of performative arts. An opera demands an array of elements such as a poetic libretto, a range of vocal frequencies from soprano to tenor, authentic costumes, and intricate set designs to transport audiences to different eras and locales.

In Labyrinth, a large-scale installation of textile, Kilomba creates paths and ways through the gallery space. The installation displays the possibility and impossibility of different routes, evoking both the transatlantic slave trade and the constant struggle for global freedom, space and movement. Cotton fabric reaffirms the artist’s practice on natural and ephemeral materials such as soil, stone and wood, reinscribing the materiality of history and the sea as an archive of violent politics. By contextualizing her new works alongside earlier pieces, Kilomba weaves a cohesive narrative that engages with issues of heritage, class, and self-care within the backdrop of Baden-Baden’s history.

Selected works, Table of Goods (2017), Illusions Vol. II, Oedipus (2018), Illusions Vol. II, Antigone (2019), 18 Verses (2022) and Sounds of Water (2023), will be presented in dialogue with new works, creating a continuity in narrative politics.

A publication brings together the collective process between the artist studio and the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden in dialogue with invited writers such as Denise Ferreira da Silva (University of British Columbia, Vancouver), Tamsin Hong (Serpertine Gallery, London), and Ashish Ghadiali (Radical Ecology & Black Atlantic, London), Dr. Manuel J. Borja-Villel (Curator, former Director Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid).  

Opera to a Black Venus is commissioned by the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. The new work and the entire exhibition will be presented for the first time as a major solo show in both museums.

Grada Kilomba is a Berlin-based Portuguese artist, whose practice deals with memory, trauma and postcolonialism. In her work she creates a poetic and immersive visual language and gives her own texts body, voice, form and movement. This year Kilomba was appointed to the prestigious Angela Davis Guest Professorship at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt, during which she will focus on “the art of performing knowledge.” She holds a doctorate in philosophy from the Free University of Berlin, and in 2023 was awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of ISPA, Lisbon, in recognition of her artistic and intellectual work. She was co-curator of the 35th São Paulo Biennial, Choreographies of the Impossible, 2023, and she is also author of the highly acclaimed book “Plantation Memories” (Unrast, 2008).

Opera to a Black Venus at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden is curated by Çağla Ilk and Misal Adnan Yıldız.