Overview
The Power Plant invites you to watch a screening of Illusions, Vol. III, Antigone by interdisciplinary artist Grada Kilomba. The hour-long screening will be followed by a Q&A between Grada Kilomba and Carolin Kochlin, Curator at Large of The Power Plant.
In the poetic Illusions trilogy, we find the familiar stories of Narcissus and Echo, Oedipus and Antigone in new versions. Kilomba reworks the ancient Greek myths and stages them together with actors, combining performance, theatre, choreography and music. Drawing inspiration from African oral traditions, she takes on the role of a contemporary Griot, a storyteller who lets the classic tales speak directly to current political issues. Kilomba’s video installations deploy ancient dramas to highlight postcolonial issues of racism, gender oppression and violence. Illusions Vol. III, Antigone was originally produced for Bildmuseet in collaboration with the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin.
About Grada Kilomba
Grada Kilomba, born in Lisbon, Portugal, is an interdisciplinary artist, whose work draws on memory, trauma, gender and post-colonialism, while interrogating concepts of knowledge, power and violence. “What stories are told? How are they told? And told by whom?” are constant questions in Kilomba’s body of work to revise post-colonial narratives.
Kilomba subversively translates text into image, movement and installation by giving her body, voice and form to her critical writing. Performance, staged reading, video, photography, publications and installation are a platform for Kilomba’s unique practice of storytelling, which intentionally disrupts the proverbial ‘white cube’ through a new and urgent decolonial language and imagery.
Her work has been presented in major international events such as: La Biennale de Lubumbashi VI; 10. Berlin Biennale; Documenta 14, Kassel; 32. Bienal de São Paulo. Selected solo and group exhibitions include the Pinacoteca de São Paulo; Bildmuseet, Umeå; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; The Power Plant, Toronto; Maxim Gorki Theatre, Berlin; MAAT-Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon; Secession Museum, Vienna; Bozar Museum, Brussels; PAC-Pavillion Art Contemporanea, Milan, among others. Kilomba’s work features in public and private collections worldwide.
Strongly influenced by the work of Frantz Fanon, Kilomba studied Freudian Psychoanalysis in Lisbon at ISPA, and there she worked with war survivors from Angola and Mozambique. Early on, she started writing and publishing stories before extending her interests into staging, image, sound and movement.
Kilomba holds a distinguished Doctorate in Philosophy from the Freie Universität Berlin. She has lectured at several international universities, such as the University of Ghana and the Vienna University of Arts and was a Guest Professor at the Humboldt Universität Berlin, Department of Gender Studies. She was a guest artist at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin for several years, developing Kosmos 2, a political intervention with refugee artists. She is the author of the acclaimed Plantation Memories (Unrast, 2008), a compilation of episodes of everyday racism written in the form of short psychoanalytical stories. Her book has been translated into several languages and listed as the most crucial non-fiction literature in Brazil in 2019. She currently lives and works in Berlin.
Dates & Times
February 26
1pm
60 mins