There’s a pleasing ease and sensuousness to “Trinket,” Kapwani Kiwanga’s exhibition at the Canadian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. That comes from not only its primary materials—millions of tiny glass beads, made on the nearby island of Murano (where glass has been produced for at least six centuries) and then strung into sweeping curtains lining the structure—but also its soothing arrangement of colors that shift from gradient to imperceptible depending on your vantage point: pale yellow, sunset orange, white, maroon, and the rare, prized cobalt draped across the building’s exterior, quivering with the breeze off the Venetian Lagoon.
This immersive environment, covering the pavilion’s interior and exterior, brings an expansiveness (and sheer beauty) to surely one of the smallest pavilions in the Giardini—and installations with such alluring aesthetic qualities are frankly rare on these grounds of late. “So much of contemporary art is ugly,” a fellow critic remarks as we appreciatively survey the installation. Before I can consider that pith, I overhear a guard sharply admonish a visitor for accidentally brushing a bead curtain: “The beads are all made by hand and strung by hand—all by hand!”
Underscoring this preciousness is the fact that Canadian-born, Paris-based Kiwanga—the first Black woman artist selected for the country’s pavilion—considers the various materials she works with as documents or witnesses, bearers of histories, economies, and culture. Research is at the heart of her practice; she estimates her process is 70% research and 30% production.
In “Trinket,” the miniature seed beads, or conterie, pack a rich history dating back to the 15th century, when they spread from Murano via commerce routes linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Besides acting as currency in some communities (conterie is derived from the word for counting), the glass beads became part of material cultures in these far-flung places, appearing in jewelry and clothes and acquiring important ritual, aesthetic, and symbolic value. The exhibition explores this network of trade, power structures, influences, and cultural exchange and examines disparities in how seed beads were perceived and the value assigned to them (European traders, for example, considered them mere trinkets), while also reflecting on the enduring legacy of the transoceanic trade.
Shepherding this ambitious project is the Canadian Pavilion curator, Gaëtane Verna, who also serves as executive director of the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University. “I'm always, as a curator, particularly interested in artists whose work is multilayered,” she told Vogue during the Biennale’s bustling opening week, where a line of waiting visitors snaked far beyond the entrance. “The beads speak of important subject matter in an abstracted way, with beauty and elegance.”
“Trinket” reveals the hidden structure of our world, where, as Verna writes in the show’s accompanying pamphlet, “societies mutate through the complexity of global commerce and cultural exchange, prompting philosophical reflections on inherent value and aesthetics and their entanglement within the web of global relations.” Through these glass beads, the curator adds, Kiwanga “construct[s] the monumental out of the minute.”
Verna, who has worked closely with Kiwanga on exhibitions in Canada and at the Wexner, finds the primacy of research in the artist’s work compelling. “Kapwani uses material as an archive and then researches and expands the work in a different way,” Verna says. “It’s always something poetic. There’s a beauty in the making. Her work comes from an idea in her brain, but then she works with different people to make it come alive. And it’s an open-ended conversation.” (Indeed Verna will continue that discussion on June 13 and 14 at an international symposium in Venice related to the exhibition, where scholars and researchers will explore material culture, commerce, and cultural transformation; those conversations will eventually be incorporated into a publication.)
Four sculptures, composed of materials in almost-raw states, are also arrayed around the interior of the space. These elements—gold, bronze, steel, Pernambuco wood, palm oil—were featured in ledgers and accounts of the transoceanic trade involving Venetian conterie. Gathering these materials with the seed beads prompts viewers to reflect on inherent value, aesthetics, and complex global economic relations. “Venice was a merchant town, so all the riches that we see were based on this trade,” Verna points out. “These beads were at the root of it. Those small units, you could say, built our Western world. And yet we don’t see it. It’s present, but it’s not perceived.”
The beads also embody this Biennale’s theme of Foreigners Everywhere. “If beads are to be considered foreign objects integrated into the world, the Canada Pavilion speaks to how they’ve been digested into a variety of cultures,” Verna notes. “Commerce is about how things from different places move and create meaning. It can be a good thing, but it can also be destructive and extractive. Here, though, Kapwani aims to make something beautiful from all this.”
