Canada's entry at Venice Biennale shows how glass beads shaped the modern world

Over the years, 60 Canadian artists have won the honour of showing their work in a small, angular, wood-and-glass pavilion that sits on the end of the Venice lagoon.

But this is the first time an artist has draped the pavilion in luscious strings of cobalt-blue beads that shift and soften the outline of the building.

The beads provide the opening glance of Trinket by Hamilton-born, Paris-based artist Kapwani Kiwanga, Canada's representative at this year's Venice Biennale, the world's most prestigious art show.

In her exhibit, Kiwanga literally and metaphorically connects the dots — glass bead by glass bead — of trade that radiated out around the globe from Venice, once one of Europe's most important ports, and the impact that had.

For centuries, the beads, called conterie, were produced on the nearby glassmaking island of Murano and used as currency and for barter, taking off in the 16th century as European traders and explorers expanded their global reach.

"These little, tiny, miniscule units of glass shaped our modern and postmodern world," said Kiwanga from her studio in Rome before the opening of the Venice Biennale on April 20.

"I'm interested in how materials can be documents themselves of human, social and political interaction."

As chance would have it, the very same year she was selected to represent Canada in the Biennale, commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada, she's been living in Italy as an artist-in-residence at the beautiful Villa Medici, part of the French Academy, near the top of the Spanish Steps in Rome.

The conterie, from the Portuguese word "to count," were exchanged for everything from tropical wood to gold that was brought to Europe and used to construct and adorn everything from chairs in homes to soaring cathedrals.

In the South American and African communities the beads were traded, though, they disrupted local economies and social cohesion, says Kiwanga, whose work is concerned primarily with power imbalances, from the geopolitical to the institutional.

Inside the pavilion, the walls are adorned with more conterie, these ones inlaid with different raw materials that were once exchanged for them — Pernambuco redwood from Brazil, gold leaf and metal. Four sculptures of the same material inlaid with beadwork form physical and narrative points of contact.

Kiwanga, who is now in her mid-40s, grew up in downtown Hamilton in a working-class family with roots in Zimbabwe. Her mother was the one who exposed her to art — from the mosaics at Hamilton City Hall and paintings and sculpture at the Art Gallery of Ontario to museums when they travelled — while her family encouraged her to value personal expression over the pursuit of wealth.

"I've never had this pressure of financial success, and that defined for me quite early what freedom meant: being able to choose what I wanted to do," she said. "It was a great gift."

The idea to become an artist didn't come until her mid-20s, after she studied anthropology and comparative religion at McGill University in Montreal and worked for a few years as a documentary filmmaker in Scotland.