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.
This is the first time the work of Antonio Jose Guzman & Iva Jankovic is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Amanda Pinatih and Britte Sloothaak
