Cima Cima
Kapwani Kiwanga

The exhibition title, Cima Cima, refers to “Cimarrons” or “Maroons”, terms of Arawak origin, which were included in Spanish language to refer to people living in conditions of slavery, who liberated themselves in the Americas. Once emancipated, these women and men implemented strategies to preserve their freedom. This included establishing precarious villages ready to be abandoned, sustenance agriculture allowing for their survival, and the cultivation of plants, brought along from their local land, to be adapted to a new environment.

Cima Cima thus raises the question of deliberately concealed actions allowing for survival. It addresses the history of forms of resistance, and the practice of creative unruliness as a way of ensuring freedom.

It is precisely the cultivation of plants and their role as witnesses of human history that interests the artist here, as well as their sometimes ambivalent function: the plant that nourishes, the plant that heals, but also the plant that kills either indirectly or deliberately as poison.

Kapwani Kiwanga was born in 1978 in Hamilton, Canada. She lives and works in Paris.
Recent solo exhibitions: Flowers for Africa at the Centre Pompidou in Paris; New Work at the Kunstinstituut Melly (Formerly Known as Witte de With) in Rotterdam; and Plot at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. In 2020, Kiwanga receives the Marcel Duchamp Prize.

Exhibition produced with the support of the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris.