BARCELONA.- The Fundació Joan Miró presents Changing States from 30 April to 13 September 2026, the first solo exhibition in Spain by Kapwani Kiwanga, winner of the ninth edition of the Joan Miró Prize in 2025. Planned specifically for the Fundació Joan Miró’s spaces, the exhibition brings together a selection of representative works from Kiwanga’s career, together with three newly produced pieces for the occasion.

Changing States is presented as the materialisation and culmination of this award following a year of work between the artist and the team from the Fundació Joan Miró.

Based on close dialogue between Kiwanga and Martina Millà, curator and Head of Exhibitions at the Fundació Joan Miró and curator of the exhibition, the show provides an opportunity to experience first-hand key works from the artist’s recent career, while also incorporating new pieces. The result is a reflection on the history of materials and commercial exchanges, territorial control and power structures that have defined the modern world from the first circumnavigations to the present day. Investigating the flow of material resources and forms of control that organise territories and bodies, Kiwanga’s practice unfolds throughout the exhibition route, while emphasising, as its title suggests, the changing states of materials, crops, technologies and power structures.

Three main exhibition strands

Changing States deploys an exhibition route that, curated by Martina Millà, Head of Exhibitions at the Fundació Joan Miró, explores three main strands: 1. the transformation of materiality stemming from progressive technological developments; 2. the history of economic and cultural exchanges arising from the occupation of territories; and 3. the encounter between the temporal framework of human history and much broader geological temporality.

The works chosen to configure the exhibition route are made of materials such as plant fibres, clay, wood, glass, fabrics and ceramics, functioning as visual archives that contain social, economic and political memories. They simultaneously highlight the production conditions of materials and their transformations, as well as the impact of global capitalism and extractivism on territories and populations. Changing States also addresses issues related to the mobility of people, with a new installation connecting the body and clothing from a contemporary perspective of migration and displacement.

The exhibition concludes with a reflection on the coincidence of various temporal dimensions, relating historical time to temporalities and geological rhythms that exceed human experience, allowing the phenomena discussed throughout the exhibition to be viewed from a much broader perspective.

Publication

The Fundació Joan Miró will publish the catalogue Kapwani Kiwanga: Changing States to coincide with the exhibition, a trilingual edition (Catalan, Spanish and English) scheduled for July 2026. The publication will feature all of the works presented in the exhibition, accompanied by explanatory texts written by Kathleen Ritter. It will also feature a selection of texts and conversations that extend the most representative lines of research of Kiwanga’s practice. The catalogue will specifically include a conversation between the artist and the curator Martina Millà, an essay by the geographer Kathryn Yusoff and a conversation between Christine

Checinska and Mabel O. Wilson on the links between literature, architecture and the world of textiles and clothing.

Public and social programme

As an integral part of the exhibition, the project will deploy an extensive public and social programme that broadens and contextualises the artist’s lines of work. The programme will include seasons of conversation, performances and poetry, mediation spaces focused on the voice and listening and also educational projects developed in collaboration with schools.

Rather than being supplementary, it is an essential component of the project, reflecting a way of understanding art as a shared practice that can stimulate critical thinking and foster community.

The educational and social dimension of the Joan Miró Prize is particularly evident in this context, where artistic excellence is directly linked to participation processes, knowledge transmission and territorial involvement. This model reinforces the Fundació Joan Miró’s role as a mediation space between contemporary creation and society, consolidating an institutional practice based on interaction, debate and the collective construction of meaning.