The artist interweaves local manifestations and global flows of commodities, market, and capital, of humans, ideas, and regimes, of powers and counterpowers, threading unsuspected narrative interconnections between moments in time, places, and actors—some central, others peripheral—that resonate with each other across history. In so doing, she reads world affairs against the grain. It is a subjective perspective that picks up on details, that gathers and networks, but also isolates. Here are bodies and fates cast aside by the grand wheel of events that caught her eyes. Here are writings, some private, some from literary sources, that point ways through time and to today’s concerns. Here are materials such as tin or silk that spark clashes over resources, whose production and trade structure the human globe. Here are instants—individual constellations of figures and themes—frozen in vividly expressive lines, colors, forms, and gestures. 

Anna Boghiguian presents her first exhibition at KOW, scheduled to open for the 2022 Gallery Weekend Berlin.

On display on the ground floor is the installation A Tin Drum That Has Forgotten Its Own Rhythm (2019). Its point of departure is the industrial history and culture of Cornwall in England’s far southwest. It is a history of decline. The last tin mine in Cornwall—which at one point was one of the world’s leading mining districts—was shuttered in 1998. The installation, created for Tate St Ives, features an ensemble of figures cut from steel sheets and galvanized with tin, nickel, and copper, a process used to make the cans in which the sardines caught off Cornwall’s coasts were sold. Glimpses of local tradition, of the practices of daily life and labor, appear in the figures, complemented by drawings. A drums sit motionless, recalling the rhythm of a vanished era.