Grada Kilomba: THE WORDS THAT WERE MISSING

MCLAUGHLIN Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of new works by internationally renowned artist Grada Kilomba in Berlin. In her work, Kilomba reinterprets classic heroic sagas that are familiar to us, exposes colonial relationships, and radically questions our use of language and roles that are systemically hidden within it. With the exhibition THE WORDS THAT WERE MISSING she continues her highly topical and forceful questioning of our gender-specific and social power structures that are implicit in our historiography and the various languages. "What is actually the true story behind the story? What happens when history is told in a distorted way? How do images and legends dating back to antiquity shape our lives in the present? What happens when important parts of history are missing?" It's time to tell the story, in sound, image and form. As gently as precisely, Grada Kilomba uncovers the unarticulated words, the suppressed feelings, the archaic knitting patterns. She shapes from them the new story, which is urgently worth telling, showing and shaping. “What if our history is haunted by cyclical violence, precisely because it has not been buried properly?" asks Grada Kilomba.

In her new series of photographic works Heroines, Birds and Monsters (2020) Kilomba carefully captures the complexity of the characters from her video trilogy A World of Illusions (2019). Embodied by a female actress, Kilomba uses only a few props in an all-white room to stage the moment when Creon – King of Thebes in Greek mythology and known for the Oedipus saga and Sophocles' Antigone – looks at a black cloth representing a funeral. Creon, at the end of his immense tale of woe, realizes that violence is always repeated when history is falsified.

Grada Kilomba
THE WORDS THAT WERE MISSING
MCLAUGHLIN Galerie, Linienstraße 32, 10178 Berlin
01.05. bis 12.06.2021, Di – Sa, 11-18 Uhr
(Please observe applicable Corona rules)

www.mclaughlingalerie.com