Grada Kilomba
The Bottom of the Earth
Grada Kilomba, one of the most prominent Portuguese artists of her generation, presents at the Albuquerque Foundationher first major solo exhibition in Portugal in nearly a decade. Recognized for her subversive and unique practice of storytelling, Kilomba gives body, voice, form, and movement to silenced stories. “What stories are told? Where are they told? How are they told? And told by whom?”. The exhibition brings together a significant selection of works, including works never before shown in the country.
Grada Kilomba, with a body of work spanning large-scale installations, sculptures, video, and performance, approaches the concepts of memory, trauma, violence, and repetition in a striking yet poetic manner. In the exhibition O Fundo do Mundo (The Bottom of the Earth), the artist envisions a scenography of the future, posing a disturbing and urgent philosophical question that weaves through both her works and their material forms: “What would the bottom of the ocean tell us tomorrow, if it were emptied of water today?”
Kilomba invites us to imagine a futuristic landscape in which the “bottom of the earth” becomes a site of memory. The ocean floor is a repository of geological sedimentations and transformations, but also a repository of routes and traces of human activity—often barbaric and violent—from slavery to colonialism, from multiple wars to climate crises, all the way to the tragic genocides of today. The seabed holds countless corridors of human bodies, revealing nature itself as an archive of human existence.
In her work, the frailty of materials such as glass and nearly see-through fabric contrasts with the resilience of stone and the silent memory of burned and cut wood, which bear the traces of hundreds of years. Traversing and shaping these materials—at times elevated, others more direct—the written, sung, or merely alluded to is another recurring element in Kilomba’s moving and inspiring practice, reflecting both the breadth of her interests and her academic background.
Selection of Works by the Artist
