Kapwani Kiwanga: Trinket

A Venice exhibition comments on colonial commerce.

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Artist Kapwani Kiwanga’s installation in the Canada Pavilion at this year’s Venice Art Biennale is a stunning delight. Commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada and curated by Gaëtane Verna, Kiwanga’s Trinket features millions of suspended Venetian conterie, or seed beads, whose presence transforms the pavilion’s surfaces with their delicate, shimmering appearance. Enfolded within the beads’ elusive beauty is a provocative commentary upon the exploitative imbalances which fuelled colonial commerce, for which seed beads were often used as currency. Trinket thus reminds its viewers of Venice’s history as a centre for artisanal glasswork and expansionist mercantilism, thereby querying the sources of the wealth behind the city’s grandeur. 

The care with which the beads have been installed offers a beautiful homage to the BBPR-designed 1957 Canada Pavilion, one of the great works of postwar Italian modernism. While the pavilion is sometimes critiqued as a difficult space in which to exhibit, Kiwanga’s installation is perfectly calibrated to its surroundings. The details of the suspended strings of beads are exquisite, and bear the close scrutiny of an in-person examination. Just as the pavilion itself was thoughtfully designed around two trees growing on its site, the strings of beads have been carefully installed around exit signs, fire alarms and other accoutrements which punctuate modern buildings. A temporary raised floor, slightly removed from the walls, allows the beads to fall into a shallow reveal. The resulting effect emphasizes the vertical continuity of the iridescent bead surfaces. 

Displayed within the pavilion are several sculptures made from more beads, and from other valuable materials used in colonial commerce, such as blown glass, Pernambuco wood, copper, bronze, and palladium leaf. The resulting composition honours not only BBPR’s design, but also the Renaissance city’s tradition of using sculpture and painting to complete architecture.

Curated by São Paulo Museum of Art Artistic Director Adriano Pedrosa, this year’s Biennale was organized under the theme Foreigners Everywhere, and celebrates Indigenous, queer, and folk artists—many now deceased—whose works have not previously been shown at the Biennale. The theme stands in defence of multiplicity and outsider-ness (for we are all strangers in certain contexts) against current xenophobic trends in global politics and culture. While the national pavilions are free to chart their own courses, it is fruitful to reflect upon Kiwanga’s work through this lens. At the pavilion’s opening, Elissa Golberg, Canada’s ambassador to Italy, described Canada as a place where one finds foreigners everywhere. While such a comment invites further scrutiny (especially when seen from the perspective of Indigenous Canadians), one could find far worse places to begin defining our national identity.

While Kiwanga’s masterpiece is on display in Venice until November 24, 2024, another exhibition at the National Gallery in Ottawa this summer helps to complete our understanding of beadwork as a medium of material culture, artistic endeavour, and collective identity. Radical Stitch features Indigenous artists’ beading works—many of which are truly stunning—in a celebration of this medium of cultural self-expression. Taken together, Trinket and Radical Stitch elevate beadwork while inviting us to question: which materials have value, and why?

Architectural historian Peter Sealy is an Assistant Professor at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto.

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