Januario Jano on show at the Biennale San Paolo 2023

The Fundação Bienal, which organizes the Bienal de São Paulo, has announced the 120 artists, one of them is Januario Jano, who will be participating in the event’s thirty-fifth edition. Curated by art historian and former Reina Sofía director Manuel Borja-Villel, artist Grada Kilomba, independent curator Diane Lima, and anthropologist Hélio Menezes, the Bienal is titled “Choreographies of the Impossible” and heavily features Black, Indigenous, and non-white artists and artists from the Global South. The quartet in a statement released this past April described this iteration as “a mutual project around multiple possibilities to choreograph the impossible. As the title already suggests,” they continued, “it is an invitation to radical imaginations about the unknown, or even about what figures as im/possible.”

 

Baptism
In the photographic installation Baptism (2019), we observe a set of twenty photographs showing Januário Jano taking off white clothes. The exuberance of the image of the whole draws attention. However, in the research of the materials, any disinterested contemplation is dissolved: the white clothes are memories of the civilizing impositions of the Portuguese colonizers on Angolans. The fabric, 100% cotton, refers to the fields of Baixa do Cassange, where the massacre that ignited the struggle for Angola’s liberation took place in 1961. This dimension of violence – especially the response to it – emerges from a craftsmanship that understands research not as a stage to reach a product, but as the living matter to which the gaze must constantly return when it is willing to propose other worlds.

Video, sculpture, painting, photography, installation, sewing, or interdisciplinary art, if you will. The repertoire of languages that Jano uses to put his ideas into practice is vast, as is vast and unsettling the range of forces that underlie all artistic making as a consequence of history and culture. There are many media, layers, and themes that are in friction when considering the complexities of the field of cultural identities, a terrain in which he operates to instigate debate. From Luanda, in Portuguese, but also from the land of the Ambundu, in Kimbundu – Bantu language – or in English from London, where he trained and settled. The artist’s own biographical transits highlight the marks of colonization, a central theme in his work; also for this reason, it is before himself – the mirror, his history – that Jano finds the raw material that occasionally escapes his own life and ends up echoing in the words of his fellow country-woman: “surviving our history is akin to surviving in an unforgiving city” – said Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, as he might have said himself. ¹

 

Text by: Igor De Albuquerque, translated from Portuguese by Philip Somervell

1. Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, “Morrer de Nostalgia” in Revista Quatro cinco um, São Paulo, jun. 2023, p. 8.