Torkwase Dyson

Torkwase Dyson describes herself as a painter, although her work goes far beyond classical painting. In large-scale sculptures, drawings, architectural installations, and performative works, she explores the connections between body, space, nature, and infrastructure. She is particularly interested in how “black bodies” perceive, create, and traverse space, refusing the limitations of colonial material and ideological traces.

Dyson’s work is based on her concept of “Black Compositional Thought”—which explores ideas of coherence as a foundation for improvisation. “Black Compositional Thought” is a practice that considers how worlds of beauty and spatial liberation are composed, organized, and constructed at every scale of life without the promise of stability.

An important theme in Dyson’s work is water. It is a physical element, a bearer of history, and a symbol of movement, resistance, and change. In her 2023 sculpture series Liquid A Place, shown at Desert X in Palm Desert, California, water becomes a repository of collective memories. Rivers, lakes, and oceans serve as archives of enslavement, migration, movement, connection, and healing. Dyson asks how water can be understood as both a physical resource and a political means and how liquids can help develop new ideas of care, connection, and mobility.

For Kunsthaus Bregenz, Dyson is planning a multipart project. On view on the lower floors will be large-scale yet lightweight sculptures, intended as “multiscale paintings” in which small details and larger contexts become visible simultaneously. On another floor, a twelve-channel sound installation condenses instrumental recordings and electronic sounds into a comprehensive spatial collage. On the top floor, Dyson presents immersive paintings inspired by the Plantationocene—a term for the global changes caused by large exploitative agricultural enterprises such as plantations. The works draw attention to historical and contemporary forms of exploitation, racism, and environmental destruction. Dyson’s works are both monumental and fragile, modular and interconnected.

The experience always remains physically palpable. Her work dispenses with fixed structures and thrives on improvisation, transience, and change. Of particular importance to Dyson is the intimacy of collective invention, in which change and transience become tangible as the foundations of experience.

Torkwase Dyson (b. 1973, Chicago) lives and works in Beacon, New York. Her works have been featured at the 2024 Whitney Biennale, New York, the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale and the 35th Bienal de São Paulo, both in 2023, and the Sharjah Biennial 14 in 2019. She has had solo exhibitions at venues including ‘T’ Space, Rhinebeck, New York, in 2023, the Pace Gallery, New York, in 2022 and 2020, the Hall Art Foundation, Schloss Derneburg, Germany, and the Serpentine Pavilion, Serpentine Galleries, London, both in 2021, and at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana, in 2020.