Antonio Tarsis, Storm in a teacup, Carlos/Ishikawa, London, 2024. Installation view.
2024. Antonio Tarsis
Storm in a teacup
Texto crítico da exposição individual do artista na galeria Carlos/Ishikawa, em Londres
WEB
Texto crítico da exposição individual do artista na galeria Carlos/Ishikawa, em Londres
WEB
20.09-19.10.2024
Carlos/Ishikawa, London
“Storm in a teacup”, the exhibition title, is an English expression that means doing much ado about little. Antonio Tarsis (b. 1995, Salvador, Brazil), as a Brazilian immigrant artist in London, subverts the meanings by working with such a restricted and modest range of materials to create an inexhaustible poetic and aesthetic production. His artistic practice, however, arises from enduring storms of sociohistorical, racial, and xenophobic violence. By invoking the allegorical power of tea in the British Empire’s history and its colonies during the spice trade, Tarsis reclaims an imperialist motto for a production that denounces hegemonic dynamics in colonized countries as his homeland.
The artist explores the centrality of labor in the human condition—especially labor born from violence—by contrasting the rigorous processes of industrial science with traditional, modest manual craftsmanship. Industrial processes like standardizing matchbox sizes, mining for electronic devices, and shaping virtual communication through algorithms are juxtaposed with manual actions: hand-cutting, folding, pasting, dyeing papers, and exposing labels to sunlight for natural fading.
This approach recalls the scarcity of tools and materials in his early years—living in a favela at 12 after his mother’s death, he dropped out of school, self-educated through public library books in Salvador, and began working with materials found on the streets. However, the emphasis on manual production in Tarsis’ work also connects to the complex artistic traditions rooted in African heritage and the labor systems devastated since colonial enslavement. Retroactively, these same African artistic systems—particularly regarding formal abstractions, pattern repetition, and textile visual vocabulary—were usurped in the reinvention of aesthetic systems in European and American modern art, such as geometric abstraction and minimalism, artistic movements to which Tarsis's work is often associated. The very brand name printed on each matchbox, "Guarany," a Europeanized spelling of "Guaraní"—one of South America's most representative Indigenous groups—reveals the ongoing epistemicide and genocide in the country. The name is flanked by a pair of profile silhouettes, fitting the Amerindian stereotype, crowned with a feather headdress.
The characteristic repetition of sections of wooden matchboxes emphasizes the fragility of a structure: not only physical but epistemological, denouncing the systemic unsustainability of violent productive logics. In the exhibited works, Tarsis replaces the matchstick, the element that ignites the fire, with irregular pieces of charcoal, an aftermath of the body set on fire and ready for a new combustion. A potential, flammable storm in a teacup, a given recipe for disaster. The pieces of charcoal refer to black flesh seen as fuel, within an annihilating system of categorization that does not obey the individuality of the entities it houses, still partially or totally covered by a paper that gives them another color, another appearance – as if peeling something or someone. The destruction of this rigor aims to reveal not only the structures but their cores, not only the forced compartmentalizations but the bodies that inhabit them.
The suspended grid matchbox walls float in space like an ambiguous open obstacle, a barrier that prevents the observer's body from crossing but is still visually penetrable by irregular passages, as if to allow viewing a place that cannot be easily reached. They critically address an architecture of violence, from surveillance mechanisms and fences that delimit public space from private property to curtains and structures that partition precarious housing. The entryways, created by the irregular destruction of the grid, evoke the doors of houses in Brazilian favelas riddled with rifle shots, replicating a labyrinthine environment shaped as intricate alleyways wounded by catastrophe and indelible scars of violence.
Slight slits between the red planes and the exhibition walls, where the work never touches, re-establishes similarities with Brazilian artistic legacy, such as the series Relevos Espaciais (1959-1960) and Núcleos (1960-1966) by Hélio Oiticica—geometric-volumetric experiments in primary colors that hover in space—, in addition to the penetrability of the elements akin to Oiticica’s Nas quebradas (Penetrable) (1979) and Cildo Meireles’s Através(1983-1989). Tarsis’s installation reinforces the creation of layered fields of vision through the succession of the suspended walls but also mimics physical, psychological, and ideological apparatuses of sociohistorical segregation. In navigating these spaces, we confront both imposed challenges and the triumph of overcoming them.
Visible through the grid gaps, resting on the floor, are presented the works from the Symbolic Genocide series. They replicate the insignia of Brazilian military groups and the country's brutal police violence in a continuous formal involution that subtracts elements from the coats of arms—referring both to the everlasting genocide of poor and black people in the country and to artistic abstraction through formal synthesis. This hostile heraldry is embroidered by metal needles piercing the fabric like projectiles through flesh. A connection between embroidery and the war industry is highlighted: German engineers whose companies supplied the Nazi regime and wars in Brazil transformed the rapid-cutting mechanism of sewing machines into automatic machine gun firing mechanisms—capable of firing hundreds of rounds per minute.
In works dyed with red pigment, Tarsis does not merely reference blood—evoking both the energetic drive of life and the tragic violence of death—but also alludes to a genealogy of colonization through the relentless extraction of natural resources. The name “Brazil”—from “Brasil,” in Portuguese, meaning “in a state of ember”—was derived from the “pau-brasil” tree, whose red sap resembled embers. This timber, used to dye fabrics for European royalty and aristocracy, was violently extracted by Portugal to replace the expensive pigments bought in the Orient, leading to its near extinction in the very land that bears its name.
Tarsis, in the Linha do horizonte (Horizon line) series, incorporates the paper labels that color the matchboxes, dividing the pictorial plane with a horizontal axis that separates the composition into two predominant hues and suggests a landscape. Each paper fragment is the result of the artist's manual interventions—such as dyeing and tearing—and the passage of time: the delicate material is exposed to sun and rain, fading naturally and serving as a witness to a real landscape that also reflects ecological concerns related to the extraction of natural resources and the climate crisis. The papers, which once wrapped around a flammable element, now evoke tranquility, with golden dots and lines—electronic components with actual gold—populating the sky like stars and lightning bolts. Interestingly, the proposition of elements produced by steelmaking processes as celestial bodies and references to the hardness of labor share etymological origins: the Latin word “sīdereus” refers to a group of stars, as in “sideral”; while the Greek word “sídāros” refers to iron and blacksmithing, such as in “siderurgy”; both related to the Proto-Indo-European root “sweyd” which, in English, generates the word “sweat.”
In a work on a plinth, Tarsis addresses colonial and contemporary gold mining, as well as the generation of electronic waste—two phenomena that directly affect colonized countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. In just four years, between 1750 and 1754, Portugal extracted 15.8 tons of gold from Brazilian lands using slave labor. Much of this extraction was used to pay taxes that Portugal owed England, gold that expanded the financial resources for the British industrial revolution from the second half of the 18th century onwards—and which is related to the coal so present in Tarsis' production. In the digital age, parts with gold alloys are present in the billions of cell phones that connect us worldwide. He buys old cell phones from Brazil, Mexico, India, and Nigeria, displays their electronic circuits, and extracts small golden components from their boards through surgical cuts and chemical reactions. The artist transforms circuits initially designed using engineering and optimization parameters into aesthetic compositions. In this exhibition, in partnership with The Royal Mint, a company founded in London in the 9th century, large quantities of electronic waste collected by Tarsis are recycled and produced gold nuggets using sustainable techniques. These nuggets—which, during the Brazilian colonial period, were used by black people who acquired their own freedom from slavery to produce jewelry that they wore as religious devotion and symbol of social ascension—are placed in a clay gourd supported by a wooden branch, which rotates in a glass display.
Over a loosely woven fabric with see-through woof—circumscribing the fiber optic thread to the ancestral hand-made textile thread in an inescapable logic of human technology—, Tarsis composes a constellation with shiny electronic parts. Representing the fictitious sky of a non-place, he symbolizes all places in a network consisting of the most diverse countries that manufactured these parts—whether through mining, processing, design, or final production. The artist alludes to territories that cannot be seen, made invisible by mineral extraction processes, and to the set of stars that emblazon the Brazilian flag. By sticking it into a raw branch of the very wood that generates paper, coal, embers, matchsticks, and matchboxes—in opposition to the maximum level of processing of electronic parts in their final reduced state—, Tarsis coins an anti-flag, questioning the relevance of national unity, the pertinence of a digital territory, and the relationship between sovereignty and colonial violence.
Texto originalmente publicado na exposição “Storm in a teacup” na galeria Carlos/Ishikawa, em Londres, de 20 de setembro a 19 de outubro de 2024
Carlos/Ishikawa, London
“Storm in a teacup”, the exhibition title, is an English expression that means doing much ado about little. Antonio Tarsis (b. 1995, Salvador, Brazil), as a Brazilian immigrant artist in London, subverts the meanings by working with such a restricted and modest range of materials to create an inexhaustible poetic and aesthetic production. His artistic practice, however, arises from enduring storms of sociohistorical, racial, and xenophobic violence. By invoking the allegorical power of tea in the British Empire’s history and its colonies during the spice trade, Tarsis reclaims an imperialist motto for a production that denounces hegemonic dynamics in colonized countries as his homeland.
The artist explores the centrality of labor in the human condition—especially labor born from violence—by contrasting the rigorous processes of industrial science with traditional, modest manual craftsmanship. Industrial processes like standardizing matchbox sizes, mining for electronic devices, and shaping virtual communication through algorithms are juxtaposed with manual actions: hand-cutting, folding, pasting, dyeing papers, and exposing labels to sunlight for natural fading.
This approach recalls the scarcity of tools and materials in his early years—living in a favela at 12 after his mother’s death, he dropped out of school, self-educated through public library books in Salvador, and began working with materials found on the streets. However, the emphasis on manual production in Tarsis’ work also connects to the complex artistic traditions rooted in African heritage and the labor systems devastated since colonial enslavement. Retroactively, these same African artistic systems—particularly regarding formal abstractions, pattern repetition, and textile visual vocabulary—were usurped in the reinvention of aesthetic systems in European and American modern art, such as geometric abstraction and minimalism, artistic movements to which Tarsis's work is often associated. The very brand name printed on each matchbox, "Guarany," a Europeanized spelling of "Guaraní"—one of South America's most representative Indigenous groups—reveals the ongoing epistemicide and genocide in the country. The name is flanked by a pair of profile silhouettes, fitting the Amerindian stereotype, crowned with a feather headdress.
The characteristic repetition of sections of wooden matchboxes emphasizes the fragility of a structure: not only physical but epistemological, denouncing the systemic unsustainability of violent productive logics. In the exhibited works, Tarsis replaces the matchstick, the element that ignites the fire, with irregular pieces of charcoal, an aftermath of the body set on fire and ready for a new combustion. A potential, flammable storm in a teacup, a given recipe for disaster. The pieces of charcoal refer to black flesh seen as fuel, within an annihilating system of categorization that does not obey the individuality of the entities it houses, still partially or totally covered by a paper that gives them another color, another appearance – as if peeling something or someone. The destruction of this rigor aims to reveal not only the structures but their cores, not only the forced compartmentalizations but the bodies that inhabit them.
The suspended grid matchbox walls float in space like an ambiguous open obstacle, a barrier that prevents the observer's body from crossing but is still visually penetrable by irregular passages, as if to allow viewing a place that cannot be easily reached. They critically address an architecture of violence, from surveillance mechanisms and fences that delimit public space from private property to curtains and structures that partition precarious housing. The entryways, created by the irregular destruction of the grid, evoke the doors of houses in Brazilian favelas riddled with rifle shots, replicating a labyrinthine environment shaped as intricate alleyways wounded by catastrophe and indelible scars of violence.
Slight slits between the red planes and the exhibition walls, where the work never touches, re-establishes similarities with Brazilian artistic legacy, such as the series Relevos Espaciais (1959-1960) and Núcleos (1960-1966) by Hélio Oiticica—geometric-volumetric experiments in primary colors that hover in space—, in addition to the penetrability of the elements akin to Oiticica’s Nas quebradas (Penetrable) (1979) and Cildo Meireles’s Através(1983-1989). Tarsis’s installation reinforces the creation of layered fields of vision through the succession of the suspended walls but also mimics physical, psychological, and ideological apparatuses of sociohistorical segregation. In navigating these spaces, we confront both imposed challenges and the triumph of overcoming them.
Visible through the grid gaps, resting on the floor, are presented the works from the Symbolic Genocide series. They replicate the insignia of Brazilian military groups and the country's brutal police violence in a continuous formal involution that subtracts elements from the coats of arms—referring both to the everlasting genocide of poor and black people in the country and to artistic abstraction through formal synthesis. This hostile heraldry is embroidered by metal needles piercing the fabric like projectiles through flesh. A connection between embroidery and the war industry is highlighted: German engineers whose companies supplied the Nazi regime and wars in Brazil transformed the rapid-cutting mechanism of sewing machines into automatic machine gun firing mechanisms—capable of firing hundreds of rounds per minute.
In works dyed with red pigment, Tarsis does not merely reference blood—evoking both the energetic drive of life and the tragic violence of death—but also alludes to a genealogy of colonization through the relentless extraction of natural resources. The name “Brazil”—from “Brasil,” in Portuguese, meaning “in a state of ember”—was derived from the “pau-brasil” tree, whose red sap resembled embers. This timber, used to dye fabrics for European royalty and aristocracy, was violently extracted by Portugal to replace the expensive pigments bought in the Orient, leading to its near extinction in the very land that bears its name.
Tarsis, in the Linha do horizonte (Horizon line) series, incorporates the paper labels that color the matchboxes, dividing the pictorial plane with a horizontal axis that separates the composition into two predominant hues and suggests a landscape. Each paper fragment is the result of the artist's manual interventions—such as dyeing and tearing—and the passage of time: the delicate material is exposed to sun and rain, fading naturally and serving as a witness to a real landscape that also reflects ecological concerns related to the extraction of natural resources and the climate crisis. The papers, which once wrapped around a flammable element, now evoke tranquility, with golden dots and lines—electronic components with actual gold—populating the sky like stars and lightning bolts. Interestingly, the proposition of elements produced by steelmaking processes as celestial bodies and references to the hardness of labor share etymological origins: the Latin word “sīdereus” refers to a group of stars, as in “sideral”; while the Greek word “sídāros” refers to iron and blacksmithing, such as in “siderurgy”; both related to the Proto-Indo-European root “sweyd” which, in English, generates the word “sweat.”
In a work on a plinth, Tarsis addresses colonial and contemporary gold mining, as well as the generation of electronic waste—two phenomena that directly affect colonized countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. In just four years, between 1750 and 1754, Portugal extracted 15.8 tons of gold from Brazilian lands using slave labor. Much of this extraction was used to pay taxes that Portugal owed England, gold that expanded the financial resources for the British industrial revolution from the second half of the 18th century onwards—and which is related to the coal so present in Tarsis' production. In the digital age, parts with gold alloys are present in the billions of cell phones that connect us worldwide. He buys old cell phones from Brazil, Mexico, India, and Nigeria, displays their electronic circuits, and extracts small golden components from their boards through surgical cuts and chemical reactions. The artist transforms circuits initially designed using engineering and optimization parameters into aesthetic compositions. In this exhibition, in partnership with The Royal Mint, a company founded in London in the 9th century, large quantities of electronic waste collected by Tarsis are recycled and produced gold nuggets using sustainable techniques. These nuggets—which, during the Brazilian colonial period, were used by black people who acquired their own freedom from slavery to produce jewelry that they wore as religious devotion and symbol of social ascension—are placed in a clay gourd supported by a wooden branch, which rotates in a glass display.
Over a loosely woven fabric with see-through woof—circumscribing the fiber optic thread to the ancestral hand-made textile thread in an inescapable logic of human technology—, Tarsis composes a constellation with shiny electronic parts. Representing the fictitious sky of a non-place, he symbolizes all places in a network consisting of the most diverse countries that manufactured these parts—whether through mining, processing, design, or final production. The artist alludes to territories that cannot be seen, made invisible by mineral extraction processes, and to the set of stars that emblazon the Brazilian flag. By sticking it into a raw branch of the very wood that generates paper, coal, embers, matchsticks, and matchboxes—in opposition to the maximum level of processing of electronic parts in their final reduced state—, Tarsis coins an anti-flag, questioning the relevance of national unity, the pertinence of a digital territory, and the relationship between sovereignty and colonial violence.
Texto originalmente publicado na exposição “Storm in a teacup” na galeria Carlos/Ishikawa, em Londres, de 20 de setembro a 19 de outubro de 2024
