Goldsmiths-trained visual artist Januário Jano works with sculpture, video, photography, textile, sound, and performance. His research-intensive practice is invested in understanding how culture is produced—to whose benefit and at whose expense—and how the dynamics of cultural production  ultimately shape identities across time. His work, particularly on the influence of Christianity on the cultural heritage of Angola, has explored whether culture is fact or fiction—grounded in a materiality or solely constructed. A theme Jano explores in his Cathedral (Kassanje) is the convergence between Christianity and the ancestral spiritual practices and belief systems of the Ambundu in Angola. As part of this research into the cultural amalgamation imposed by colonizers, Jano gained interest in the mponda, a kind of special bag or large inbuilt pocket that was sewn into the normed dresses Kimbundu women were required to wear by the Portuguese. Jano subsequently developed a series of textile and photographic works, shown here as Untitled (Mponda 004), that reference this attire. Beyond conveying meaning through textiles that were colonial impositions on these communities, Jano’s textile-based works feature silkscreen-printed photographs, collage, hand sewing, acrylic paint, and rope in various constellations. In these works, Jano returns to the textile cultures lost to Portuguese colonial practices in Angola and beyond, practices that were designed to homogenize and accelerate assimilation into colonial ‘order’ via Christianity, extractive wage labour, and cultural homogenization. In the mponda, Jano retrieves pockets of resistance and subversion amongst processes of colonial social engineering.

Cathedral (Kassanje) (2024) co-produced by Januário Jano and HKW, 2023–24.

Works in the exhibition: Untitled (Mponda 004) (2023), textile, fabric, transfer paper, hand and machine sewing, rope, metal arm, net, fibre, 190 × 154 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Nosco; Cathedral (Kassanje) (2024), installation with sound, metal structure, plexiglass, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist