BARCELONA.- The Fundació Joan Miró, with support from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) and CUPRA, has awarded the prestigious Joan Miró Prize to the artist Kapwani Kiwanga (Hamilton, Canada, 1978) in recognition of a unique artistic career that combines academic research, social commentary and a great capacity for creating complex and innovative visual forms. Based in Europe for over two decades, Kiwanga, an anthropologist by training, has developed an interdisciplinary practice that addresses issues such as comparative religion and anthropology through a variety of formats, such as installation, sculpture, video and performance.
The jury for the 2025 Joan Miró Prize, chaired by Marko Daniel, Director of the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, comprised outstanding professionals from the art world and representatives of the prize’s official sponsors: Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director of the Sharjah Art Foundation in the United Arab Emirates and current curator of the Sydney Biennale; Pablo Lafuente, Artistic Director of the Museu de Arte Moderna of Rio de Janeiro (MAM); Ann-Sofi Noring, former Co-Director of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet (Sweden) and current member of the Administrative Board of the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts; Marie- Hélène Pereira, Senior Curator for Performative Practices at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin; and Jorge Diez, Head of Design CUPRA. The jury decided to award the prize to Kapwani Kiwanga after assessing an exceptional shortlist of finalists, including Jumana Emil Abboud (Palestine, 1971), Arahmaiani (Indonesia, 1961), Bonnie Devine (Canada, 1952) and Christodoulos Panayiotou (Cyprus, 1978).
The jury is delighted with the participation in the prize of all the finalists, whose work enriches and honours this award. It reached a majority consensus to award the prize to Kapwani Kiwanga, recognising the extraordinary commitment and depth of her production, qualities that are directly associated with the values that characterised the work of Joan Miró. In their statement, the jury for the 2025 Joan Miró Prize noted the following: ‘The jury wishes to especially highlight the precision and rigour with which Kapwani Kiwanga formalises historical and social processes that have shaped contemporary realities.’
Kapwani Kiwanga
Trained as an anthropologist, Kapwani Kiwanga (1978) is a multidisciplinary Canadian and French artist living and working in Paris and Berlin. She views her research-based work as an experimental archive that considers power imbalances past and present. Her installations invite audiences to reflect on the impact that the spaces we inhabit have on their users, both through their design and their history.
Trained at McGill University in Montreal and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Kiwanga constructs her pieces from intensive research, often based on forgotten or silenced histories. The artist deliberately blurs reality and fiction in order to destabilise hegemonic narratives and open up spaces for marginalised discourses.
Her work has been exhibited in the world’s leading contemporary art centres, including the New Museum in New York, MOCA in Toronto, Haus der Kunst in Munich, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, CAPC in Bordeaux and the Museu Serralves in Porto. In 2024, she represented Canada in its pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where she presented her installation Trinket, a poetic and critical reflection on global trade and unequal exchange through the history of glass beads.
Some of the awards she has received include the Marcel Duchamp Prize (2020), the Sobey Art Award (2018) and the Zurich Art Prize (2022), all of which have consolidated her as an artist of international renown. Her work explores the relationship between power, architecture and societal structures, developing a unique visual language that she defines as ‘exit strategies’: forms that allow us to imagine alternative futures and rethink dominant structures.
