Frieze London - Booth IN07 / 12 - 16 October 2022
Oscar Santillán, Forecast, 2021, Device with colonial plants and apocalyptic movies, 118 x 76 x 81 cm
Oscar Santillán, Antimundo 00H, 2022, Oil on canvas, 190 x 126 cm
Antimundo 00H, 2022 (Detail)
Oscar Santillán, Antimundo 00G, 2022, Oil on canvas, 120 x 85 cm
Jamilah Sabur, After mining the soil is less capable of retaining water, 2022, C-Type print on aluminium, 44.5 x 88.5 cm (framed) and
acrylic-casein on linen, 120 x 120 cm
Jamilah Sabur, On the Geological Structure of Jamaica (V.A. Zans), 2022, Acrylic-casein on linen, 80 x 80 cm
Booth IN07, special section Indra's Net
Booth IN07, special section Indra's Net
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Copperfield’s booth with Jamilah Sabur & Oscar Santillán has been selected by Sandhini Poddar (Guggenheim Abu Dhabi) for her curated section at this year's Frieze London.
Sabur will have a solo exhibition opening at The BASS, Miami at the same time as Frieze (ending April 2023), while Santillán will have a major exhibition in the Netherlands opening in 2023 and is the recipient of the Holt/Smithson Foundation’s Island commission. The booth is structured around a central work titled ‘Forecast’ by Oscar Santillán, surrounded by a new series of oil paintings by Santillan and new text paintings by Jamilah Sabur. Oscar Santillán and Jamilah Sabur’s practices intersect in considering “human geographies” – in which we attempt to map culture onto nature, often with colonial agendas. From our treatment of plants, land and people to our mapping and recording, we have shaped, categorised and often violently altered the landscape and all that lies in it. ‘Forecast’ shows us a continuity between colonial botany and the contemporary destruction of our planet while Sabur’s paintings refer similarly to mining, forced movement of people, animals and plants. Sabur’s paintings often consider her relationship to the geography that stands between her, her birthplace, and her ancestors or the whitewashing of US history that expunged even traces of native people, re-inserting them into official records like her passport. Santillan’s assemblages break with the Western classification system’s division of the world into minerals, plants, and animals, revealing other possible considerations of life on Earth. ENQUIRE - FORECAST Plant containers, called ‘wardian cases’, were commonly used by 19th century botanists in order to transport ‘exotic’ plants from European colonies into the continent. This device consists of a metal structure holding 6 monitors, and a small garden placed in the space formed by the screens. The top part of the device, which resembles the aesthetics of colonial structures such as wardian cases or green houses, prevents any sunlight from entering into the inner space. The garden could be called a ‘colonial garden’ as it comprises several plants extracted, in previous centuries, from European colonies and introduced into the continent by explorers and botanists.The screens, which play a long collection of apocalyptic films, have the important role of keeping the garden alive with their tragic light. The device is sealed to the viewer’s eyes, except for a small lens on top which allows people to look inside of this eco- system, which is lit by the tv screens facing to the inside. ANTIMUNDO SERIES In 2020 artist Oscar Santillán co-published ‘The Andean Information Age’, a publication exploring the relationship between ancient and new technologies, with special emphasis on the Andes region, in South America, where the artist comes from. That research showed Santillán that one of the major differences between the mindset of Western colonizers and the Indigenous communities of the region were the divergent ways in which these two worlds related to reality itself. The colonizers attempted to classify everything in order to dominate what fitted within their categories, but large fields of the knowledge produced by the local communities (through processes taking thousands of years of symbolic sedimentation) did not fit in the grid. Vital concepts such as land and nature would not match between these two worldviews. Often, where the colonizers saw ‘land to be owned’, the inhabitants of the Andes saw sentient entities, which nowadays many still call ‘earth beings’. The images in the ‘Antimundo’ series, which Santillán started after publishing ‘The Andean Information Age’, are precisely an approach to versions of ‘nature’ that are in tension with normative categories and normative representations of the landscape. The elements in the Antimundo ecologies are half recognizable but, together ultimately defy categorisation within any existing framework. This is a view of nature that is inspired by the past and the future. The method used by the artist in order to generate such ambiguity includes a combination of his hand- drawings, an A.I. image generation programme trained with diverse source material, and digital 3D rendering. In order to generate further friction with the tradition of how nature is represented by the West, Santillán translates the resulting digital imagery into the very medium traditionally used for such representations, oil painting. By doing so, the Antimundo images are in dialogue but also in tension with the normativity of Western narratives. TEXT PAINTINGS BY JAMILAH SABUR Jamilah Sabur presents 3 new works she describes as inner discussions, interior conversations with the deceased Dr Verners Aleksandrs Zans. Dr Zans was a Latvian geologist with wide interests who worked as an associate professor at the University of Riga until 1944. After the Second World War, he and his family were interned in a camp for displaced persons near Hamburg, where they lived until Zans was appointed government geologist in Jamaica, by the British Empire, to lead the modern Geological Survey Department. Zans and his family arrived in Jamaica in October 1949. The Survey grew and flourished under Zans. His work in Jamaica was diverse, including studies of mineral deposits, bauxite genesis, karst hydrology, and the marine physiography of the near shore. Zans formulated a new theory of bauxite formation; alumina-rich deposits derived from older, but topographically higher beds accumulating in karst depressions on the surface of the mid- Cenozoic White Limestone Group. Under his leadership the Survey published the 1958 1:250,000 provisional geological map of Jamaica, the first new map of the island since 1865. Zans died unexpectedly in September 1961. The life of Zans was profoundly influenced by the political changes that occurred in Europe as a result of the two World Wars. During his boyhood Latvia did not exist as a separate state, the territory being included in the Baltic Provinces of the Russian Empire of the Czars. Following the communist revolution of 1917 and the defeat of Russia, the Baltic Provinces were invaded first by the Germans and then by the British, who carved Latvia out of the Provinces of Livonia, Pskov, Vitebsk, and Courland, and established it as an independent state, with Riga as its capital, in 1919. In the context of this coversation where both the life, identity and homeland(s) of the artist and Dr Zanz where profoundly shaped by the decisions and whims of colonial powers, the subtle poetics of lines such as "Boreal Transgression" echo with greater meaning. --- OSCAR SANTILLÁN Oscar Santillán (b. 1980 Ecuador) is interested in connecting distant points: the sweat of a person with the beat of drums, paper made out of a medicinal tree with Nietzsche’s typewriter, or bringing together the breeze displaced by a running jaguar and a marble container. Santillán began as a self-taught artist within the environment of Lalimpia, a collective he co- founded with other artists of his generation. After following different studies in Ecuador, a fellowship allowed him to pursue and obtain an MFA in Sculpture at VCU—Virginia Commonwealth University, US. He teaches at AKV|St.Joost, and he is a guest tutor at Sandberg Institute, both in The Netherlands. He has recently been selected as one of the five artists to create new work for the Holt/Smithson Foundation’s The Island Project: Point of Departure, along with Tacita Dean, Renée Green, Sky Hopinka, Joan Jonas between 2021 and 2026. He has also been commissioned projects by the Yokohama Triennial (Japan), Ballroom Marfa (USA), Bienal de Arte Paiz (Guatemala), Laboratorio de Arte Alameda (Mexico), and the Eli and Edithe Broad Museum (USA). Works by Santillán have been shown at institutions such as Yokohama Triennale, Japan; Delfina Foundation, London; NRW FORUM, Düsseldorf; SongEun Art Space, Seoul; LACMA, Los Angeles, CA; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar; Zadkine Museum, Paris; FRAC Île-de- france, Paris; IMMA--Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Rochechouart Musée d’art contemporain, Rochech-ouart; Album Arte, Rome; STUK, Leuven; Trienal Poligráfica, San Juan; Castlefield Gallery, Manchester; National Dutch Dance Festival--Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht; Oud-Rekem Castle, Rekem; CAC— Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Quito; Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City; among others. Santillán’s work is part of institutional collections such as Jumex (Mexico City), LACMA (Los Angeles, CA. US); CIFO (Miami, FL. US); Centraal Museum (Utrecht, NL); FRAC Ile-de-France (Paris, FR); Adrastus (SP/MX); Museum Voorlinden (Wassenaar, NL); Fries Museum (Leeuwarden, NL); Otazu (Pamplona, SP); Museo Carrillo Gil (Mexico City, MX); among others. And, private collections such as those of Alain Servais (BE); Silvia Fiorucci (MC); Carlos Marsano (PE); Philara Collection (DE); Bieke and Tanguy van Quickenborne (BE); among others. For more information about the artist please click here JAMILAH SABUR Jamilah Sabur (b. 1987, St. Andrew Parish, Jamaica) lives and works in Brussels. Metaphysics, geology, and memory are recurrent themes in the work of Jamilah Sabur. Making critical contributions to the discursive spaces of labor and economies of movement, Sabur engages imaging on a planetary scale to recalibrate our understanding of place, time and history. Sabur’s work has been shown at galleries and institutions such as Pérez Art Museum, Miami; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, and Fondation PHI, Montréal. Her recent solo exhibitions include Eltanin, Broadway, New York (2022); DADA Holdings, Nina Johnson, Miami (2021); La montagne fredonne sous l’océan/The mountain sings underwater, Fondation PHI, Momenta Biennale, Montréal, Québec (2021); Observations: Selected Works by Jamilah Sabur, University of Maryland Art Gallery (2020). Sabur earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore (2009), and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego (2014). Her work is included in the permanent collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, The Bass Museum of Art, University of Maryland, and TD Bank Group. For more information about the artist please click here - Copperfield at Frieze London 2022 with the support of Mondriaan Fonds. |