Grada Kilomba: Opera to a Black Venus. ¿Qué nos diría mañana el fondo del océano si hoy se vaciara de agua? | Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

The exhibition Opera to a Black Venus, dedicated to the multidisciplinary artist Grada Kilomba (Lisbon, 1968), brings together a selection of installation works that is the most complete presentation of her work to date in Spain. Trained in clinical psychology and psychoanalysis at the Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada (ISPA) in Lisbon, she worked at the Júlio de Matos Hospital with survivors of the war in Angola and Mozambique before completing her PhD in Philosophy at the Freie Universität in Berlin. Strongly influenced by the work of the revolutionary philosopher, writer and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, Kilomba began to research and write about memory, trauma, race and gender to question the connections between power, knowledge and violence. With this solid academic foundation in clinical psychoanalysis and philosophy, as well as a long career as a researcher, the artist later expanded her interests on these issues through different formats, including performance, stage reading, video, photography and large-format sculptural and sound installations. Through these, the artist analyses the dominant systems of knowledge production and proposes a process of unlearning regarding Western epistemology with the intention of challenging the linearity of the historiography that in some way perpetuates the colonial economy.