Orbital Mechanics - 60th La Biennale di Venezia
       
     
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GUZMAN | JANKOVIC
       
     
       
     
       
     
Orbital Mechanics - 60th La Biennale di Venezia
       
     
Orbital Mechanics - 60th La Biennale di Venezia

60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia - Curated by Adriano Pedrosa. Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere.

In their ongoing artistic collaboration, Antonio Jose Guzman and Iva Jankovic incorporate indigo textiles, soundscapes, and performances to address how our world has been shaped by colonialism and migration.

Guzman and Jankovic reinterpret the history of sacred indigo textiles, which are deeply connected with colonial histories and the trade of enslaved Africans who carried the expertise of cultivating indigo with them to the Americas. The textiles in the installation feature an abstract pattern of intercultural DNA sequences that embody a global connection between the Black Atlantic.

The textiles are printed at the Ajrakh workshop of Sufiyan Khatri in Ajrakhpur, India. Using traditional manual dyeing methods, Ajrakh is a 4,000-year-old practice orally passed down through generations.

The accompanying soundscape alludes to ideas of belonging and exclusion through an exploration of diasporic sounds that combine electronic music, dub, punk, and Senegalese drums. The music resonates in a performance titled Messengers of the Sun which embodies the project’s themes such as migration, race, and cultural hybrid identities in a processional parade and dance.

—Amanda Pinatih and Britte Sloothaak

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_7006307.jpg
       
     
MZO_Antonio Jose Guzman & Iva Jankovic_1224.jpg
       
     
_7006313.jpg
       
     
_7006021.jpg
       
     
768A8670.jpg
       
     
_7006118.jpg
       
     
MZO_Antonio Jose Guzman & Iva Jankovic_1222.jpg
       
     
768A8769.jpg
       
     
768A8753.jpg
       
     
768A8664.jpg
       
     
MZO_Antonio Jose Guzman & Iva Jankovic_1223.jpg
       
     
_7005992.jpg
       
     
GUZMAN | JANKOVIC
       
     
GUZMAN | JANKOVIC
       
     
Orbital Mechanics - Guzman & Jankovic - 60th Venice Biennial