TORONTO.- After participating in the 10th Berlin Biennale, Grada Kilomba is presenting her work for the first time in North America at the prestigious The Power Plant in Toronto. Secrets to Tell, inspired by the video installation The Desire Project – an artwork especially created for the 32nd São Paulo Biennale (2016), had its European première last fall at MAAT, in Lisbon. The installation gathers several existing artworks by the artist in a new configuration. Secrets to Tell curated by MAAT’s own Inês Grosso is the first Project Room commission to travel abroad.

The Grada Kilomba exhibition is part of MAAT’s ongoing international touring programme which started on June 5 with the presentation of Second Nature: Portuguese Contemporary Art from the EDP Foundation Collection, at the The Kreeger Museum in Washington. This programme also includes the second international “manifesto-exhibition” currently on view at MAAT’s Main Gallery, Eco-Visionaries: Art and Architecture After the Anthropocene, MAAT’s first show co-produced with other European institutions, namely the Bildmuseet (Sweden), HeK (Switzerland) and LABoral (Spain).

The next show to travel abroad will be Ângela Ferreira’s Pan African Unity Mural, a new work conceived by the Portuguese artist for MAAT’s Project Room. The exhibition opens in MAAT on June 28, and then goes to the Bildmuseet, Sweden, on November 16. The presentation in Sweden will include the joint co-production of the artist’s new installation in conjunction with existing pieces.

Grada Kilomba – Secrets to Tell | The Power Plant – Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada Opening on June 23 - September 3, 2018 Curated by Inês Grosso, MAAT (Lisbon)
Grada Kilomba is a Berlin-based writer, scholar and interdisciplinary artist. Born in Lisbon, she has roots in São Tomé e Príncipe and Angola. Her work addresses issues of both gender and race and notions of trauma and memory, in the context of current debates on colonialism and post-colonialism. Kilomba’s trajectory has been marked by unconventional experimental and interdisciplinary artistic expression. She has used various means of expression, from performance and video installation, to stage readings and lectures, to create an interface between text and image, between artistic and academic language. To Inês Grosso, who has always followed The Power Plant’s programme, it seemed like the most appropriate institution to take this exhibition to and to propose a partnership with, given their curatorial stance and the way in which they have taken on a series of subjects which are either related to or resonate with Grada Kilomba’s work.

Another important factor was the path that the work “The Desire Project” has taken overtime. Acquired by the EDP Foundation in 2016 at the São Paulo Biennale, this work has triggered various readings and interpretations in each of the contexts it has been exhibited. “The Desire Project” was first shown in the southern hemisphere, in Brazil and South Africa, where colonialism has left profound marks (and scars), both in social, political and economic structures, and in terms of culture; it then moved on to the northern hemisphere, first in Europe (Portugal and Germany) and now in North America (Canada).