Torkwase Dyson’s work is featured in the artist’s first solo exhibition in Austria at Kunsthaus Bregenz. A series of sculptures, paintings, animation and sound works examine the relationship between space, architecture and the historical geographies of Black life.
On the ground floor of the museum, two monumental black, sail-shaped sculptures divide the hall-like space designed by Peter Zumthor. Made from poplar plywood, the works rise through the gallery, creating a physical barrier that alters the visitor’s movement through the building. Dyson refers to these forms as “hypershapes”, a concept informed by her theory of Black Compositional Thought, which considers how Black people have perceived, occupied and transformed spaces shaped by slavery and its continuing legacies.
Dyson’s practice is concerned with the politics of geography. Rather than treating space as a neutral physical condition, she examines how it is produced through historical processes, social relations and political decisions. Her work considers who is permitted to inhabit particular environments, whose movement is restricted, and how spaces of autonomy and freedom have been created within systems of control. These questions inform her approach to landscapes, waterways and infrastructure, which can function both as instruments of oppression and as sites of resistance and self-determination.
Across the three floors, the exhibition brings together different approaches to spatial composition, from the physical division of the ground-floor gallery to the use of sound and the abstraction of the paintings. The works have been developed in response to Kunsthaus Bregenz’s architecture and are being shown there for the first time.
Born in Chicago in 1973, Dyson lives and works in Beacon, New York. Her recent presentations include the 2026 Venice Biennale and the 2024 Whitney Biennial in New York. In 2025, she developed the conceptual design for Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. Her solo exhibitions have also included presentations at Pace Gallery in New York and T Space in Rhinebeck, New York.
–
Image: Torkwase Dyson, Liquid A Place. Installation view, Desert X, Homme Adams Park, Palm Desert, California, 2023. Photo: Lance Gerber. © Torkwase Dyson. Courtesy of the artist.
