The Surrealists understood that a lot will depend on context: What’s strange lining a glove, as an illustration, turns into grotesque in a teacup. Angolan artist Sandra Poulson — who studied style in Lisbon and London, and lives between the latter, Angola’s capital, Luanda, and Amsterdam — operates underneath an analogous ethos of off-kilter recontextualization. In her first museum exhibition, at MoMA PS1, she presents wood assemblages embedded in or punctured by the floating signifiers related with Angola after its Civil Warfare (1975–2002), which started instantly after the nation gained independence from Portugal. A mattress body lurches drunkenly towards the viewer; a mirror sits sullenly within the nook, a headboard bolts upright like a soldier. Throughout these principally family objects, Poulson emphasizes that historical past is one thing that haunts you as you sleep, as you gown, as you take a look at your self within the mirror.
A number of advanced circuits converge in Poulson’s work: the worldwide commerce routes that introduced this particular wooden into the artist’s path; symbols related to essential occasions in Angolan historical past as they intersect with world occasions; and, lastly, Poulson’s personal stylistic iconography. The fabric itself is freighted: Classic Dutch objects constructed from wooden that is likely to be sourced from Angola sit alongside chipboard furnishings made in China in an American fashion. It’s the bodily manifestation of a worldwide commerce community made native, the objects carrying proof of their circulation — peeling stock stickers or light stamps — and their use, such because the ring imprint of a cup.
Poulson’s technique, then, shouldn’t be a lot about lodging one signifier (logos, presidents’ silhouettes, and symbols of native organizations) into one other (wooden) a lot as colliding them collectively. Her interventions definitely draw consideration to the unseen forces which have formed these objects — the image for the European Union, a dominant commerce accomplice, seems a number of instances. However by setting them in wooden, relatively than extra ephemeral media corresponding to digital imagery and even attire, she attracts consideration to their significance and heft: These symbols and what they characterize don’t merely layer over your pores and skin; they puncture the way in which you reside.
A few of the furniture-as-artworks on view, such because the discovered mirror “Untitled (Mirror)” or the wood speaker “Leitura dos Acordos de Alvor, January 1975” (Studying of the Alvor Accords), which performs aloud the Angolan independence settlement, really feel each underdone and too on-the-nose. Whereas I preferred that the previous made a trick mirror of the exhibition house, intensifying its surreality by reflecting and recombining the opposite absurdist objects on its floor in jarring and sudden methods, positioning a discovered object within the nook as the only intervention felt a bit low-cost in comparison with different works, and fell proportionately flat to me. In the meantime, the latter emits audio so softly that I feel even Portuguese audio system would miss its significance; even when seen, the work’s meant impact of drawing consideration to the way in which historical past permeates lived expertise is already achieved extra compellingly by different items within the present.
plywood, and metal
The extra profitable objects on view are concurrently unfinished and extremely completed, heightening their absurdity. In “Cabinda Desires” (all works 2024), a bedframe with the EU emblem punched into a budget wood headboard has been sawed at a clear diagonal on one finish in order that it angles haphazardly, as if pleading for assist or reaching to seize you. Different objects short-circuited my sense of fabric logic: The wood headboard of “Candidato a Presidente da República de Angola” (Candidate for President of the Republic of Angola) sits upright on a sheet of rusted metal, uncannily unsupported. I couldn’t decide both the standard or weight of the wooden. Elsewhere — significantly in “Confessionário” (Confessional) — there are apertures the place there shouldn’t be, glass the place you wouldn’t anticipate it. And stroll round to the again of “Igreja Common do Reino de Deus” (Common Church of the Kingdom of God) and also you’ll see that it’s been blown out, a budget corkboard drawers sagging from the shortage of help, talking to the disasters that conceal beneath the veneer of stability. In the meantime, “Propaganda Flush” declares after which instantly curtails its operate: The bathroom is suspended within the air, torn from the sewage pipes that make it what it’s.
The title of the exhibition, Este quarto parece uma República! (This Bed room Appears Like a Republic!) comes from an Angolan saying that compares the messiness of nation-building to that of a room. Certainly, Poulson’s room, made from wooden, that without delay humble and enduring materials, makes historical past palpable. World commerce, colonial legacies, and the signifiers she presents usually are not distant and immaterial; they’re the structure of day by day life.
Sandra Poulson: Este quarto parece uma República! continues at MoMA PS1 (22-25 Jackson Avenue, Lengthy Island Metropolis, Queens) by way of October 6. The exhibition was curated by Elena Ketelsen González.
