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Articles / Art
by Melissa Ray
March 2, 2017

About
In two solo exhibitions, artist
Kapwani Kiwanga takes
 apart the structure of the
Menu powers that govern our Search

public space. From hospitals

to back alleys, how are
modes of control built into
the architectures that we
inhabit?

As the new urban environment spreads outwards and

upwards, turning suburbs into cities, cities into
megacities, and megacities increasingly into sites of
social unrest, maintaining control of the growing
population has become an ever-greater challenge for
urban authorities. Technology has been a useful tool
in combatting this issue, utilised by governments in
turning the public arena into a modern Panopticon in
which the Investigatory Powers Act is the watch tower
and our phones our cells.

About
 But beyond technology, innovative ways of controlling
human behaviour are now, more than ever, integrated
Menu into every aspect of urban planning. From the
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infamous Camden Bench, designed specically to

restrict undesirable behaviour like sleeping or
skateboarding, to The Mosquito, an ultrasonic anti-
loitering deterrent, the power to control the behaviour
of members of the public that are deemed
undesirable, in these cases teenagers and the
homeless, is not only exerted by governments but by
both public and private institutions.

Looking into this phenomenon of disciplinary

architecture and enquiring as to how we got here is
artist Kapwani Kiwanga. With two concurrent
exhibitions, one at Logan Center for the Arts at
University of Chicago and the other at The Power
Plant in Toronto, Kiwanga is investigating, as she tells
me, how it is that architecture, space and its
construction excludes, includes and controls people?
Focussing primarily on the use of light and colour,
About both The Sum and Its Parts at University of Chicago
and A Wall is Just a Wall at The Power Plant lay
 bare the material forms of disciplinary architectures in
order to expose their reach.
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One element that straddles both exhibitions is a

particular shade of pink, Baker Miller Pink (p/618),
which has, according to colour theorist Dr. Alexander
Schauss, the ability to calm everything from
respiration to heart rate in the body of anyone who
looks at it for a particular amount of time. In 1978 a
naval prison correctional facility in Seattle
Washington painted their holding cell walls in Baker
Miller pink with the aim of reducing aggressive
behaviour in inmates and the trend soon caught on,
making it a distinctive interior style throughout
institutional facilities in the latter half of the 20th
century. Kiwanga pays homage to this trend in The
Sum and Its Parts, where she reproduces a
deconstructed prison cell based on what Dr. Schauss
suggested to be the ideal dimensions. Scattered
around the space, painted on walls, fallen partition
walls and other elements are fragments of Baker Miller
About
pink that together complete the supposedly ideal 6x9ft
cell.
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At the Power Plant show in Toronto, this pink

reappears in Kiwangas immersive installation, lining
the walls of a long passageway, which continues
along under uorescent blue lighting. These particular
set of lights are often used in public spaces to
discourage intravenous drug users by minimising the
appearances of veins under the skin. Here, the viewer
is subjected to both treatments, both the calming
meant for inmates and a deterrent aimed at those who
are excluded from society. Creating an assortment of
behavioural control methods, Kiwanga sets out to
explore how built environments are and have been
used to control both psychological and physical
behaviour.

As urban areas are in a state of rapid expansion, the

amount of open space is declining and hostile tools
for manipulating behaviour have multiplied. Layered,
About
these elements of disciplinary architectures have the
potential to overwhelm those that it affects with
 conicting messages, which pulls into question the
Menu ultimate efciency of these tools. Are they truly Search
protecting the buildings and the people they are
intended to serve? Or are they simply making these
environments more dangerous for the people that they
are trying to deter? The general tussle over space
that is happening in the world, and especially in
Europe, is causing tension, Kiwanga says. It
therefore becomes even more important for us to think
about the little spaces but also the big spaces that
were controlling, protecting, defending or ostracising
people from.

In the extensive research period that preceded these

exhibitions, as it does each of Kiwangas projects, she
explored how light and colour have historically been
used as a mode of psychological and physical control
in institutional buildings. Arising earlier than the
overtly disciplinary nature of Baker Miller Pink was a
certain shade of green that became a popular choice

About for the walls of medical facilities, especially operating

rooms, after it was praised during the progressive
 social hygiene movement of the late 19th and early
20th centuries for its complementary visual effect on
Menu human tissue, and most interestingly to Kiwanga, how
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its mirroring of nature was said to have a calming

effect on patients.

Playing aloud throughout The Sum and Its Parts is an

audio track, which loops Kiwangas voice as she
relates different factual anecdotes from her research
into colour and the hygienist movement and how it
inuenced architecture. She recalls how a widely held
belief that open spaces and cross winds could ght
diseases such as tuberculosis became confounded
when people migrated from the countryside to the
cities during the industrial revolution. When it was
realised what overcrowding meant in terms of
disease, there was a movement that rethought
architecture and how to deal with urban planning.
Following this research into colour and medicine,
Kiwanga then, as she explains, tried to see how that
related to the colonial enterprise and how people
About rethought architecture when they went to empire.


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The idea of open windows and cross-breezes were
important in Europe for disease reduction but this
became problematic in the tropical environment
because of the fear of tropical air, which was
supposedly meant to get you ill, she continues. In
Europe, solariums were meant to treat tuberculosis as
a healing agent, whilst in a colonial context the sun
was seen as something to be protected against. The
idea of nature that was evoked in the hospital setting
got turned around as a menacing factor when
Europeans were in a colonial setting.

The artist initiates conversation about empire and

architecture again most notably in The Primer, an
abstract, non-narrative silent video. In which, a
tropical plant, jalousie blinds and a vintage fan evoke
a sense of clean air whilst large backdrop panels
painted in the aforementioned green, Baker Miller
Pink and white refers, as Kiwanga explains, to the
About Modernist international architectural movement and
how it was dependent on experimentation in
 architectural design and urbanism in what was the
colonies. This subject can also be seen in her
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appropriation of the familiar two-tone wall paint
treatment known as dado, an instantly recognisable
style that cropped up everywhere from Canada to
Tanzania, Kiwangas birthplace andher father's
birthplace respectively, throughout the 20th century.

Both exhibitions span a vast amount of historical

research, as does all of Kiwangas work, in order to
understand contemporary manifestations of particular
power structures. In this case, it is the impetus to
control peoples environment and keep certain people
included or excluded that takes centre stage. As
Kiwanga acknowledges, The public space isnt a
shared space. It is becoming more and more
controlled. What is signicant though is that the
modes of control that exist inconspicuously today
within every space we inhabit actually belong within a
long tradition of design that has sought to control the
people that use it. Through her use of archival images,
video, sound and installation, Kiwanga constructs
About
research based and imaginative narratives that tell the
story of urban environments that are made for many
 but designed for few. The question of the past is

Menu always present either in conversation with our present

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or thinking about the future, Kiwanga says. I am
reinvestigating the past to understand how it sculpts
our present.

'The Sum and its Parts' runsuntil 12 March 2017at

the The Logan Center, Chicago.A Wall is Just a
Wall runs until 14 May at The Power Plant, Toronto.
For more information on Kipwani Kiwanga
visitGalleries

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