Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman: Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims

Curator: Andrea Popelka

Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims is Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s first solo exhibition in Austria. It is centered around the presentation of a new work, coproduced by Kunsthalle Wien and presented as a large-scale projection.

The eponymous film is the latest part of a series called “Elemental Cinema,” which the artists began to develop in 2016; each film in this series is dedicated to one of the four classical elements: earth, water, fire, or air. In it, the artists have developed an approach that takes matter, material, and the elemental as its starting point—aspects which continue to be neglected and suppressed by the globally dominant order of thinking and being.

In doing so, Ferreira da Silva and Neuman’s work undermines ways of thinking about and relating to the Earth that have been shaped by European colonial modernity. They show that categories and distinctions that might seem self-evident to us—such as the interiority of the subject versus the exteriority of its surrounding—underlie a profoundly violent, unequal, racist world.

Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims turns the spotlight on the persistence, though in altered form, of this modern relation to the Earth in the history of neoliberalism and one of its defining early episodes: Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship. (September 11, 2023, marked the fiftieth anniversary of the coup d’état that violently overthrew democratic socialist Salvador Allende, elected president of Chile.)

The experimental essay film was shot in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Because of the extreme aridity and elevation of the terrain, the skies above the desert are completely clear, allowing for an unobstructed view of the stars. Scattered across the land are powerful telescopes, through which scientists gaze into the deep time of the cosmos, while the surrounding desert freezes history: Today you can find prehistoric stone drawings there, but also labor camps from colonial times which were later reactivated during Pinochet’s dictatorship and used to exploit opponents of the regime—stories of violence that stay hidden in plain sight. The artists ask: “How can there be such clarity and obscurity at the same time?”

Neuman and Ferreira da Silva’s work experiments with thinking and sensing simultaneously the various moments of material existence: the quantic, cosmic, organic/mechanic, historic/geologic. It often departs from a particular site, but then moves through and weaves together various times and places to show the planetary scope and historical depth of pressing geopolitical issues.

In Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims, the wind—air is the classical element taken up in this part of the series—travels from the Sahara to the Amazon and along the Pacific coast. Like the film’s off-screen voices, the composition and movement of material reality tells stories of migration and displacement, but also of another geography drawn by the winds.

By thinking with matter, the artists dig up and experiment with the soil of what supposedly is. Alongside and beyond the critique of, for example, history or politics, they thereby allow to reimagine reality beyond a constitutively violent world.

The extensive public program accompanying the exhibition includes workshops, performances, open study sessions, film screenings, and discursive formats. In cooperation with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Tanzquart­ier Wien, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and other partner institutions.

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Press contact: Katharina Schniebs / T +43 1 521 89 221 / presse@kunsthallewien.at