The Wexner Center for the Arts Partners with National Gallery of Canada for a Symposium at the Venice Biennale

For the symposium, the interdisciplinary panel will present their ongoing research and engage in expanded conversation on topics and subject matter that informed the conceptualization of Trinket.

Delving into the implications of power dynamics, transnational trade, and other structures on which our societies depend, this program will explore the multifaceted research informing Kiwanga’s ambitious project at the Biennale through input from the artist and Verna, and the insights of an extraordinary panel of artists, curators, and academics.

Vinicius de Aguiar Furuie is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough, whose work on the glass-bead trade in Amazonia has been published in the Harvard Review of Latin America and resulted in a display at the inaugural exhibition of the Humboldt Lab in Berlin.

Denise Ferreira da Silva, a Brazilian philosopher and artist, is currently Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. She is also the author of books such as Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), Unpayable Debt (2022), and The Impagavel Divide (2019).

Writer and philosopher Nadia Yala Kisukidi is currently associate professor in philosophy at Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis University. She was previously vice president of the Collège international de philosophie, Paris (2014–16) and a fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Columbia University (2022–23). She is a member of the editorial committee for Les Cahiers d’Études africaines (EHESS) and cocurated Yango II – Biennale de Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo (2022).

Alexandra Kahsenni:io Nahwegahbow is Anishinaabe and Kanien’kehá:ka and a member and citizen of Whitefish River First Nation with maternal roots in Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Territory. Nahwegahbow recently held the position of Associate Curator of Historical Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada and is now a faculty member at Carleton University, cross-appointed with the Department of History and the Institute of Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture. 

Karin Pallaver is an associate professor of African history at the University of Bologna, where she teaches African history and Indian Ocean history. She was previously researcher at the British Museum, London, and from 2018 to 2020 was president of the Association of African Studies in Italy. She has published texts in several books and journals, and she has a PhD in history from the University of Cagliari, Italy.

Cultural historian, writer, and curator Michael J. Prokopow brings expertise in material and visual culture, design history, architectural theory, and critical theory. His recent publications include Reside: Contemporary West Coast Houses (2024), Hurvin Anderson (2021), and an upcoming book on the artist June Clark. In 2023 and 2024, he was a visiting scholar at the Yale Center for British Art. He holds a PhD from Harvard University and is a faculty member at Ontario College of Art and Design University, Toronto.

Anne Ruderman is an assistant professor of economic history at the London School of Economics. Her first book, Supplying the Slave Trade, will be published by Yale University Press in 2025. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, among others. Ruderman received her PhD from Yale University and her AB from Princeton University.

Pierre Niccolò Sofia is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Padua, Italy, where he is carrying out a comparative analysis of economic resilience of Venetian glass and silk industries and trades in the 17th and 18th centuries. In 2022, he obtained a PhD from Côte d’Azur University, France, with a dissertation on the Venetian glass beads industry and trade in the 18th century.

Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George E. Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and a professor in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University, New York. With her practice Studio&, she codesigned the recent Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Wilson is the author of books including Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016) and Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012) and coedited the volume Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020).

Royce K. Young Wolf is a Hidatsa, Mandan, and Eastern Shoshone mother, language and culture activist, curator, and artist. She is a member of the Ih-dhi-shu-gah (Wide Ridge) Clan and is a child of the Ah-puh-gah-whi-gah (Low Cap) Clan. She has a PhD in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Native American art and curation at Yale University. She prioritizes culturally responsive care and relationship (re)making as the inaugural Assistant Curator of Native American Art at the Yale University Art Gallery and as collection manager of the Native American Collections at the Yale Peabody Museum, New Haven.

The symposium will be moderated by Anaïs Castro, Assistant Curator, Special Projects (Venice) for the National Gallery of Canada; Dionne Custer Edwards,[SR1] [SM2]  head of Learning & Public Practice at the Wexner Center for the Arts; Emily Haidet, curator, public programs, for the Wexner Center for the Arts; and Carolin Köchling, an art historian and adjunct curator at Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project who curated Kapwani Kiwanga’s 2017 exhibition A wall is just a wall for The Power Plant, Toronto. The closing remarks will bring the moderators in conversation with Costanza Longanesi Cattani, who worked as a Research Assistant with Kiwanga on her project for the Canada Pavilion.

Those interested in attending can register via the symposium page at wexarts.org. For those unable to attend, a program of the symposium will soon be available on the event page and a recording of the event will be shared with the public at a later date. The symposium will be held primarily in English and the recording will be captioned with French and English subtitles.

A Coincidence of Wants, the Shape of Value is co-organized by the National Gallery of Canada and the Wexner Center for the Arts and held in collaboration with TBA21 – Academy at Ocean Space.