Opera to a Black Venus

Artist, author and thinker Grada Kilomba (b. Lisbon, 1968; lives and works in Berlin) mastered a unique practice of storytelling. Her work is often described as “a new postcolonial minimalism”. Using performance, choreography, video, large scale sculptural and sonic installations Kilomba blurs form, image and movement and therefore the boundaries between the disciplines she is familiar with. Opera to a Black Venus makes reference to the Black history of resilience and resistance, and is dedicated to the entanglement between ecological collapse and colonial injustice. The new commissioned works Opera to a Black Venus (2024), a large-scale video installation, and Labyrinth (2024), a site-specific spatial installation, are at the center of the publication accompanying the exhibition. The authors Denise Ferreira da Silva, University of British Columbia, Vancouver; Tamsin Hong, Serpentine Gallery, London; and Ashish Ghadiali, Radical Ecology & Black Atlantic, London, as well as Çağla Ilk and Misal Adnan Yıldız categorize Kilomba’s work along her subversive stories of memory and resilience.