Art as anthropology: uncovering and upending regimes of visibility

Over the past decade, Canadian-born, Paris-based artist Kapwani Kiwanga (born 1978) has created complex installations, sculptures, performance lectures and films that consider marginalized histories and colonial economies. Drawing from her training in anthropology and the social sciences, Kiwanga’s ethereal environments bring attention to the backstories of systems of authority and their embodied effects.

Accompanying the exhibition at the New Museum, this catalog provides one of the most complete overviews of Kiwanga's work in sculpture and installation. Inspired by the early 18th-century New York legal codes known as “lantern laws”—ordinances that required all Black, Indigenous or mixed-race individuals over 14 to carry lanterns or lit candles after dark if not accompanied by a white person—her new commission for the New Museum weaves together different layers of opacity and transparency through the use of large-scale curtains and mirrored surfaces, playing with natural light and darkness.