Antonio Jose Guzman - Iva Jankovic - Stigter van Doesburg - Spatial Rotations - Electric Dub Station Series
'Electric Dub Station' is an ongoing collaborative project by visual artists Antonio Guzman and Iva Jankovic. It contains a range of references; from a reinterpretation of indigo blue textiles, deeply rooted in the history of Western colonialism to contemporary migration issues, visualized through the use of Guzman's DNA in their work. For the series, they use the Ajrakh indigo block print technique.
The works are created in their studio in Amsterdam and executed in the Sufiyan Khatri studio in Ajrakhpur, India. Ajrakh block printing is more than 4,000 years old and the indigo pigment the first natural source of blue dyes. With this blue, the artists create an arsenal of works. From geometric-looking canvases to performances in costumes with the same prints. The blue refers both to art history and its normative aesthetic and to our colonial past and together with the DNA patterns, it represents a society that embraces rather than excludes migration.
Symbolism draws the works into the past where ancestral spirits are embedded in indigo. Sometimes the blue is incorporated into pictures of riots and demonstrations, though it is never made clear exactly how and what, sometimes it stands alone as an abstract painting with literal blue blood on it.
Impressive are the tapestries that are both rich with meaning and decorative. The series moves between past and present, abstraction and figuration, ethics and aesthetics, from punk to modernism, from Ghana to Japan.