THE SECRETARY’S SUITE draws from a photograph of the United Nations Secretary General’s office in 1961, which Kiwanga found on the UN’s digital image library. This black-and-white source photograph captures a wall of secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld’s office, decorated sparsely with a table, some chairs, art and two diplomatic gifts: a leopard rug from Northern Nigeria and a bust of Goddess Laxmi / Lakshmi from India. In many ways, the photograph is unremarkable. Except for a strange twist of history: Hammarskjöld died, mysteriously, in a plane crash while on a peacekeeping mission to the Congo (at a time when African colonies were fighting for independence) just two weeks after the photograph was taken. Kiwanga uses the image and its strange circumstances as a point of departure to look at the ambiguity of diplomatic gift giving, and gift-giving culture more generally. “I’m interested in the exchange of worth and value, and what it means to have a gifting relationship with someone else,” Kiwanga said, “because this engagement is more complicated than it might initially appear – it may actually be a relationship of mutual obligation.” The installation presents a blown-up version of the photograph transferred onto semi-transparent fabric behind a bench […] where visitors can sit and watch a video that narrates past diplomatic gifts, ranging from the expected, such as flowers, to the odd, a wedding dress, to the downright threatening – as in the dagger and sheath gifted from Turkey to Russia in the late 16th century. All the gifts mentioned in the work are factual, but in the video component Kiwanga begins to interject small seeds of doubt, her signature blend of fact with the slightest amount of fiction, or re-positioning, that subtly upends everything. “I would say that 98% of my work is fact – or, information that has been verified or supported by experts within a given field,” says Kiwanga. “Really, very little is actually fictional, but it’s just enough to make the audience question the information they’re receiving.” This careful unbalancing is accomplished within THE SECRETARY’S SUITE by Kiwanga’s integration of speculation – about the possible context of certain gifts, and the death of Hammarskjöld. Caoimhe Morgan-Feir, Auszug aus excerpt from Canadian Art, Online, 2016