Middle Passage
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Artist(s):
- Andrew Ananda Voogel
Project 88 is pleased to present Los Angeles based, Andrew Voogel’s first solo exhibition, Middle Passage in India. Middle Passage is a meditation on the journey endured by millions of indentured Indian laborers in the early part of the 19th century. Colonial ships built specifically for transporting indentured Indians to the former colonies brought individuals across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans to ports throughout the Caribbean. This crossing was known as the Kalapani-a statement to the darkness of the passage and the unknown trials of the sea that would be faced and eventually lead to the distant realities of indentured plantation life in the colonies.
Through a series of drawings and videos, Voogel evokes memories of the crossing, and the arrival into a new landscape. Inducing abstract gestures, Middle Passage pieces together fragments of culture and memory as it moves through the traumatic history of this lesser known crossing. The dark imagery contained in this body of work is at once sublime and primitive. Voogel seeks out the point where linear history is severed, leaving us at the moment of arrival, where we find ourselves landed on alien shores, left to make our own way through the darkness.
