West, London
Délio Jasse
Arquivo Urbano
Tiwani ContemporaryTiwani Contemporary is pleased to announce Arquivo Urbano, an exhibition of new works by Délio Jasse. The exhibition includes new photographic emulsions, prints on ortho film and a projection installation highlighting Jasse’s ongoing interest in capturing and re-imaging the urban landscape of Luanda, the capital of Angola, through experimental photography. Based on material Jasse shot in the city between 2013 and 2018, the series Sem Valor (2019) sketches an elliptical portrait of Luanda, which witnessed rapid economic development in the early noughties after 30 years of civil war, followed by a catastrophic crash as oil prices collapsed in 2014. Jasse's layered and entirely analogue process for this series involves hand-painting with light-sensitive emulsions, long exposure times (directly to sunlight) and gold leafing. The prints are overlaid with gold leafed words, lifted from an old rotating stamp used to imprint paperwork. The pairings between words and images are somewhat perplexing and open up, by means of unexpected word-image associations, a line of critical enquiry into Angola’s recent history and the present-day challenges the country faces. In Arquivo Urbano (2019) - a series of prints on ortho film, Jasse reworks his own photographic archive and juxtaposes negative and positive shots of noted landmarks in Luanda. The series points to the past but additionally, the nature of the photographic process to create the images alludes to a utopian architectural future for one of the fastest expanding cities on the African continent. Jasse’s exploration of the photographic archive and architectural hybridity is further explored in Darkroom (2013), a slide installation on loop which remodels Jasse’s photographic archive as it brings together a live series of projected images. Born in 1980 in Luanda, Angola, Délio Jasse lives and works in Milan, Italy. Recent exhibitions include: MAXXI, Rome (2018); Villa Romana, Florence (2018); Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (2018); Biennale dell'immagine, Lugano (solo, 2017); Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm and New York (2016 and 2017); SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2017); Bamako Encounters, Bamako (2017); Lagos Biennial, Lagos (2017); Tiwani Contemporary, London (solo, 2016); Dak’art Biennale international exhibition (2016); and the Angolan Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale (2015).