SOLO SHOWS

Through an installation incorporating painting, sound, and video, the artist establishes a dialogue with his ancestors—his grandfather through spiritual knowledge, and his father through the pictorial craft. In this way, material and metaphysical realms intertwine to give rise to a shadowed space that transports us to the realm of myth. The exhibition functions as an act of surrender, a shared purification unburdened by mundane inhibitions. In this unveiling before an audience, an extreme tenderness emerges—a profound affection expressed by the artist towards the experience of life itself and the encounters with otherness that shape and transform us.

The Tiger Child was a gift bestowed upon Tahuanty by his grandfather during a ritual encounter and has been a recurring presence in his work since 2021. At this moment, it appears to be entering a symbolic adolescence, surrounded by a mythological world inhabited by two-headed serpents, stars, hummingbirds… Now, it arrives to teach us how to engage with myths and symbols through a form of play that is both innocent and defiant—tender in its destruction. From one painting to another, the Tiger Child integrates its body with the surrounding world, nibbling on the crown that represents the grandfather. It marvels at the beauty of sunflowers, allowing itself to be illuminated by them; it shakes the rattles that embody the grandmother; it becomes entangled in the chumbes; it disarranges the feathers that give shape to visions. In this way, it moves through four distinct moments: birth, play, wise insolence, and sweet death. These four phases in the paintings’ narrative are echoed in the construction of the exhibition’s soundscape, created collaboratively by Jacanamijoy and Esteban Steinlausky, a composer of medicinal music. The sound was designed to accompany the video, generating an atmosphere akin to a deeply rooted cave—an immersive space in which the exhibition unfolds.

The visual and sonic atmosphere of the exhibition can be understood as a hypothesis on how magic, myth, mystery, and tenderness might inform contemporary life, offering alternative ways of engaging with both the material and spiritual worlds. Far from staging a romanticized cultural representation, Tahuanty proposes forms of expression that emerge from his lived experience, his lineage, his ancestors, and his dialogue with them, while also incorporating his aesthetic education within Western artistic traditions. Through these works, we witness the formation of a novel expression of cultural and spiritual identity—one that may open pathways to new ways of inhabiting the world.

Curatorial text by Maria Adelaida Samper

 Tahuanty Jacanamijoy speaks from a place that is distinctly his own due to the configuration of his cultural and ethnic mix, which shapes his life experience. Having indigenous roots while also receiving a Westernized formal education enables him to approach the decolonial issue, aiming to complexify the cultural and cosmogonic amalgamation without attempting to obliterate either of the two cultural currents that form his sensibility. In the project presented here, the artist seeks, through aesthetic operations, to build a bridge between the local ritual experience of indigenous cosmogonies and the globalized ritual experience of the rave. This bridge or conjunction emerges through the blending of symbols and archetypes belonging to both of these contexts: it’s a synthesis that unites the jungle with the club. This transition from one to the other is described in the sound piece that Tahuanty engendered in collaboration with electronic music producers, proposing a journey that traverses bird songs, human chants, and machinic chants.

The installation combines art, magic, and the intrinsic human need to incorporate moments of collective ritualization where the event of connection occurs (between one another, between us and the whole, with oneself, etc.). In the contemporary and globalized ways of existence we navigate, practices surrounding electronic music development are evidently akin in their development to the ritual and trance moments achieved through practices belonging to non-Western cosmogonies. Thus, Tahuanty proposes three figures that seem like totems, semi-deities, or new archetypes, melding a wealth of symbolic information: the falling sun, opposites united by a stream of serpentine tears, the bird pecking at its bursting heart. The main themes coursing through these figures are the fall and connection: the fall as the moment that opens the door to connection with music, with the body, with others; the fall wherein this sort of collective therapy occurs, engendering a kind of ecstatic healing.

The exhibition title speaks of those heart strings where we feel the deepest emotions and affections—Aristotle believed all animals possessed an innate spirit nesting in the heart, and this idea informs much of the poetics about this organ—the heart that pumps blood throughout the body but also contains threads that vibrate during key moments of connection with others. This vibration is like the luminescent glow of neon, inducing physiological changes in us such as blushing, increased heart rate, tremors, moving us to tears, shifting from euphoria to sadness to calmness. Through this essay that is “Heartstrings In The Club,” Tahuanty aims to emphasize the transcendent experience achieved through the communal experience of the party, unshackling it from the commonplace of the mundane, to make us feel closer to cultural roots that we easily idealize for feeling distant from our contemporary urban experience.

Sound produced in collaboration with: 
Adi
Junn (Juan Charry)
Nicolás Duque
Steinlausky

Text by Maria Adelaida Samper, curator at SGR galery.