HOUSTON, TX.- From Texan sand to Tanzanian sisal, the raw material of Kapwani Kiwanga’s enveloping and powerful exhibition activates the galleries of the Moody Center for the Arts, September 17 through December 18, 2021. Articulated through new, site-specific installations created for the Moody, together with a video work, Kapwani Kiwanga: The Sand Recalls the Moon’s Shadow employs the artist’s research-based approach to offer an investigation into how natural materials can be interpreted as archives of shared human and natural history. In turn, this body of work inspires alternative understandings of social, economic, and environmental realities.

“This fall we are delighted to share Kapwani Kiwanga’s work with Moody audiences and to explore the interdisciplinary implications of her practice through a season of public conversations and performances around the complex ramifications of natural resource extraction,” Alison Weaver, Suzanne Deal Booth Executive Director of the Moody Center for the Arts, said. “Through a minimalist formal vocabulary, Kiwanga addresses some of the most relevant issues of our time.”

In her first solo exhibition in Houston, Kiwanga (b. 1978, Hamilton, Canada) created two site-specific installations for the Moody, Maya-Bantu and Dune. Both works address linkages between trade and labor, as well as society and the environment. The exhibition also includes Kiwanga’s 2012 video, Vumbi, which draws attention to the nuanced relationship between humans and the planet. Collectively, these works meditate on raw material as a primary resource, simultaneously in the context of cultural exploration and economic development.

“Drawing parallels between Tanzania’s national independence and natural gas extraction practices in Texas, Kiwanga’s multi-layered exhibition presents natural and raw materials as conduits for understanding history,” Ylinka Barotto, Associate Curator, said. “Kiwanga’s site-specific installations, composed of more than 50 tons of sand and 275 pounds of sisal fiber, will create an immersive experience that offers viewers an opportunity to consider the historical and present-day role of nature within global economic systems.”




Maya-Bantu explores the potential of sisal fiber to serve as a reflection on colonization and development in East Africa. By layering the plant’s pearly-white, raw fiber to create a minimalist yet monumental sculpture, Kiwanga speaks to the crop’s historic significance in global trade--originating in Central America and later cultivated in Tanzania. First imported to the east African country at the end of the nineteenth century by German settlers, sisal required labor for plant cultivation and the production of sisal line fibers. In the decades following the country’s independence from Britain in 1961, the material played a vital role in the expansion of the nation’s agricultural economy. This large-scale work, which is on view in the Moody’s Central Gallery, testifies to the cultural and commercial value of the natural material itself and expresses the importance of self-sufficiency and self-determination in the nascent stages of national independence.

With Dune, Kiwanga will transform the Brown Foundation Gallery into an immersive desert-like environment made of sand from central Texas, an essential product for fracking. Both controversial and revolutionary, the practice of fracking--or hydraulic fracturing--has driven economic growth in Texas and impacted energy production worldwide. While mechanically ingenious for its capacity to draw natural gas and oil from the previously impenetrable rock, fracking produces byproducts--solid and liquid waste containing pollutants and carcinogens--that can negatively affect humans, animals, and the environment. Dune underscores the long-lasting implications of such extraction methods on Texas’s economy, as well as the hazards fracking presents to both the landscape and the population.

In the media gallery, Kiwanga presents the 2012 video Vumbi. The title, meaning “dust” in the East African language of Kiswahili, refers to the red powder that blankets parts of the rural Tanzanian landscape during the dry season. In the video, Kiwanga cleans this vermillion layer of dirt from vegetation, exposing brilliant green leafage, which will invariably become covered again. The Sisyphean task performed by the artist is both an act of domesticity as well as a means of subtractive painting. While suggesting a delicate and caring human relationship with nature, the work also highlights an inexorable force of nature.

As a whole, Kiwanga’s exhibition explores the ways in which humanity’s interactions with and appreciation for nature morph over time, constantly acquiring new meanings when viewed through the historical lenses of production, culture, and the economy.

This exhibition curated by Ylinka Barotto, Associate Curator, Moody Center for the Arts. Substantial support is provided by the Moody Center for the Arts Founder’s Circle and the Elizabeth Lee Moody Excellence Fund for the Arts.

Based in Paris, Kapwani Kiwanga studied anthropology and comparative religion at McGill University, Montreal, and art at École des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Kiwanga was awarded the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2020, following her receipt of the Frieze Artist Award and the Sobey Art Award in 2018. Last year, Kiwanga had solo exhibitions at Haus der Kunst, Munich; Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam; and Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel/Bienne. These shows were preceded by exhibitions at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; the Esker Foundation, Calgary; the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; and Power Plant, Toronto. The Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago; South London Gallery, London; and Jeu de Paume, Paris, among other institutions, have also hosted solo exhibitions of Kiwanga’s work.