Este quarto parece uma República! (This bed room appears like a republic!), on view till 6 October at MoMA PS1 in Queens, marks the Angolan artist Sandra Poulson’s first museum exhibition. It arrives at a really poignant second. Taking an archaeological strategy to supplies, Poulson creates installations that discover how symbols embedded in widespread objects maintain world energy constructions—a theme match for the brand new period of commerce protectionism.
The PS1 set up restages a piece initially commissioned by Jahmek Modern Artwork, a industrial gallery in Angola’s capital metropolis of Luanda, and offered at Sadie Coles HQ as a part of Apartment London 2025, the long-running collaborative initiative that swimming pools sources by pairing galleries overseas with native hosts. Drawing from her curiosity in indicators and the way they intersect with materials histories, Poulson’s work interrogates cultural and financial alternate formed by postcolonial legacies and globalisation.
The Artwork Newspaper: The exhibition title comes from a Portuguese phrase your father used to say to you. How have you ever expanded this private expression right into a broader reflection on sociopolitical dynamics?
Sandra Poulson: As a toddler, I didn’t understand how this concept of a republic might relate to untidiness. I requested my dad the place the sentence got here from, and he mentioned it references the 1910s when Portugal turned a republic, with Angola remaining an Ultramarine Province [Província Ultramarina de Angola]. In these first few years of the republic, Portugal had so many presidents [nine in the first decade], so the phrase pertains to being a topic to an imperial organisation however recognising its shortcomings on the similar time. This can be a core thought of my apply—how I relate micro examples to the macro tales to see hidden codes inside the home and the on a regular basis.
Your installations for the 2023 Sharjah Structure Triennial and the 2024 Venice Biennale explored how mud acts as a signifier of mobility in Luanda. Against this, the PS1 work centres wooden. How does this materials relate to Angola’s previous and current?
The assemblages are a mixture between discovered furnishings from the Netherlands and parts in wooden made by me. In Amsterdam, there’s a wooden library inside the Royal Tropical Institute, which is crammed with samples from earlier Dutch territories, together with Angola. Rich Dutch folks might order timber from these wooden samples to be minimize within the colonies and delivered to the Netherlands to be become furnishings.
There’s additionally an enormous open-air wooden workshop in Luanda, exterior of Kikolo Market, the place many younger males hand-make furnishings, as a result of it’s cheaper than importing it. The headboards of those beds may have a Nike or an Apple emblem. I requested them if that is one thing that the client requested for, and so they defined that it was primarily an inventive signature. I turned very within the work that went not solely into development however the supposed signatures that, for me, felt extremely misplaced.
I’m fairly thinking about these deliberate inaccuracies, the best way that objects get dislocated and renaturalised someplace, to then function in seemingly silent methods to redefine our relationship with aspiration, energy and financial capacity.
Poulson’s use of wooden pertains to Angola’s previous and current, referencing open-air wooden workshops in Luanda
Dami Vaughan; Courtesy Jahmek Modern Artwork
Are you able to say extra about your use of institutional logos, comparable to these of the European Union and the Common Church?
In Angola, it’s widespread to distribute T-shirts with logos of political events or firms as a free type of propaganda. However folks received’t put on them exterior, as a result of it presupposes endorsement of the occasion or enterprise. So the shirts are usually used for sleeping and find yourself in essentially the most intimate place: the bed room. They function a bit like a Computer virus. They’re a present, however they arrive with an unstated contract of naturalisation of the image and what’s behind the image.
The cultural theorist Fredric Jameson wrote in 2005: “It’s simpler to think about the tip of the world than the tip of capitalism”—a line that feels extra prescient than ever. The place do you see the archaeological impulse working in our present second of acceleration and globalisation?
This archaeological-impulse-leading facet of my apply comes from sources that precede capitalism. It’s crucial to know capitalism as a man-made machine that requires steady subscription and validation, a bit like archaeology itself. So once I take into consideration archaeological processes, I take into consideration unravelling these man-made gadgets that redefine folks’s wants.
There was renewed consideration to the fragility of the worldwide provide chain within the face of tariffs. Has the present local weather shifted how you concentrate on financial energy relations?
My strategy isn’t shifted by the present financial atmosphere in a immediately responsive means. I largely draw on historic environments, and I analyse uneven energy relations by wanting into intimate formulation of energy upkeep, usually by highlighting the semiotics of these formulation.
Maybe there’s a renewed visibility and urgency, however I’d place that renewal prior to now few years somewhat than the previous few weeks. It was inevitable that the West would come to narrate to this financial asymmetry, however there are nuances that we miss after we globalise and group by way of hemispheres. If something, the fragility of the worldwide provide chain is one thing that’s a whole lot of years outdated.
Sandra Poulson: Este quarto parece uma República!, MoMa PS1, 24 April–6 October
