|
Edson Chagas
Edson Chagas (born 1977) is an Angolan photographer. Trained as a photojournalist, his works explore cities and consumerism. His Found Not Taken series resituates abandoned objects elsewhere within cities. His other large-format photograph series play on tropes related to African masks. Oikonomos consists of self-portraits of Chagas with shopping bags over his head as symbols of consumerism in Luanda, his home city. The passport-style photographs of Tipo Passe show models wearing nondescript, contemporary clothes and traditional African masks. Chagas represented Angola at the 2013 Venice Biennale, for which he won its Golden Lion for best national pavilion. His works have also exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, and Brooklyn Museum. Early lifeEdson Chagas was born in Luanda, Angola, in 1977.[1] His father studied aeronautics and his mother worked at a supermarket. Chagas and his brother were raised in Maianga, where his immediate family continues to live. He lived through the Angolan Civil War and recalled the need to be resourceful due to scarcity of goods. His father sent him and his brother to Portugal for safety during the war, where they moved several times. Chagas wanted to train as a cameraman but the class was focused on photography, not video. He began taking photos with his grandmother's compact camera and photography became a means for Chagas to understand himself, communicate, and stimulate thoughts about memories. Chagas moved to the United Kingdom[2] and received a degree in photojournalism from the London College of Communication. He also studied documentary photography at the University of Wales, Newport.[3] He said it took him many years to decide to professionalize as a photographer.[2] CareerChagas has described his work as being interested how identity and consumerism are perceived in society.[2] Chagas represented Angola at the country's first Venice Biennale national pavilion in 2013, curated by Paula Nascimento and Stephano Rabolli Pansera. His exhibition placed on the floor giveaway, poster-sized photographs of discarded objects positioned in relation to weathered architecture in the Angolan capital, Luanda.[4] These poster stacks were in "stark juxtaposition" with the opulent, Catholic decorations of the host, Palazzo Cini,[4] which had been closed for the previous two decades.[5] The New York Times called the pavilion a "breakout star" of the Biennale, and it won the biennial's top prize, the Golden Lion for best national pavilion.[4] The photographs on display came from Chagas's larger series, Found Not Taken,[6] which included conceptually similar photographs from cities—in addition to Luanda—where the photographer had spent time: London and Newport, Wales.[3] The curators had asked Chagas to display only the photographs from Luanda for the Biennale, which he found acceptable since it didn't take the series out of context.[6] His 2011 Oikonomos series of large-format self-portraits with shopping bags over his head were intended to hide his identity behind symbols of globalized capitalism and secondhand consumerism in Luanda[7][8][9] as secondhand goods permeate African consumer culture.[3] This series was later shown at the Brooklyn Museum's 2016 Disguise: Masks and Global African Art exhibition.[8][10] Hyperallergic highlighted the performativity in the artist wearing a Barack Obama bag over his head as kitschy, funny, and like another persona.[10] In 2014 at Paris Photo, Chagas showed a large-scale portrait photograph series, Tipo Passe, depicting models dressed in nondescript, contemporary attire contrasting with traditional African masks.[11][3][12] The clothes came from street markets and import retailers, while the masks came from a private collection.[3] The prints were made in editions of seven.[11] He showed selections at exhibitions at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2018)[12] and the Tate Modern (2023).[13] Selections across these series also showed at the Museum of Modern Art's Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015 contemporary photography exhibition[3] and the 2016 1:54 art fair.[9] In 2017 and 2018, Chagas captured photographs of the abandoned Fábrica Irmãos Carneiro textile factory in Luanda, which he showed in Lisbon in 2022. The interior photos show textured close-ups of its abandoned machines, cobwebs, dust, and rust. Others show the degradation of furniture, wall paint, and the building's facade.[14] As of 2015, Chagas continues to live in Luanda and works as the image editor for Expansão, an Angolan newspaper.[3] Selected exhibitionsSolo
Group
References
Further reading
External links
|
||||||||||||||||||
