This online exhibition of photographic work created by Grada Kilomba in 2020 is presented in concert with 18 Verses, Kilomba’s first exhibition with Pace, on view at the gallery’s flagship in New York from May 12 through July 1. Both exhibitions are organized in collaboration with Goodman Gallery. This focused digital presentation features a suite of images, evocatively titled Heroines, Birds and Monsters, that captures the characters and stories from Kilomba’s video trilogy, A World of Illusions (2017-19). Setting her scenes in an unidentifiable, empty space, Kilomba reenacts universal myths from a new perspective, redefining what the human condition is.

Working across various disciplines—from performance, sound, and staged readings to video and sculptural installations—Kilomba’s work interrogates notions of memory, trauma, gender, and identity in the post-colonial moment. At the core of her work is a practice of decolonial storytelling. Kilomba’s urgent questioning, subverting, and reimagining of stories deemed “universal” are acts of a continuous process of unlearning. Through her distinctive visual lexicon, Kilomba endeavors to dismantle the dominant structures of knowledge production.