Watch Now: Jamilah Sabur
b. 1987, St. Andrew Parish, Jamaica; lives and works in Brussels, Belgium
b. 1987, St. Andrew Parish, Jamaica; lives and works in Brussels, Belgium
Presenting with Copperfield at Frieze London 2022 as part of Indra's Net, curated by Sandhini Poddar
Artist Jamilah Sabur is also invested in human geographies and the extractive impact of culture on nature. Colonialism’s classifications of man, ancestry, language and nature, into controllable taxonomies haven’t accounted, for the many leakages and displacements within these unstable and mutable categories. For Sabur, colonialism’s legacy is revealed in the whitewashing of America’s Indigenous lands and languages (she migrated to the US as a child from Jamaica). When Sabur became a US citizen, she adopted as her middle name the term, “Ibine-Ela-Acu” (trans. Water- Sun-Moon) from the language of the Timucua Indigenous people, who had been residing in Florida and Georgia before they were wiped out.
About Indra's Net
Derived from ancient Buddhist and Hindu thought forms, Indra’s Net refers to an ethics of being, where an individual atom holds within it the structure of reality. Imagine a vast bejewelled net: at every nexus there is
a reflective orb that mirrors and refracts every other orb in its entirety. Each part is held within the whole in a system of dependent origination. All sentient life is interconnected; shifts to one atom subtly alter the rest.
Curated by Sandhini Poddar, this group presentation brings together leading international artists whose practices are informed by this prescient metaphor. In various media, we learn of ancestry, history, language, consciousness and futurity as being bound to the earth, which serves as a perennial witness through the arc of time.
In the video above, Sabur shares her response to the question, 'What does interconnectedness mean to you?', an enquiry which is at the heart of the section.
