Shadow Energies

Residency at Museum der Kulturen Basel

Artist Shiva Lynn Burgos was invited by the Museum der Kulturen Basel to access the museum’s archives and object reserves to create a new, contemporary body of work primarily focused on her cyanotype and photographic practice.

Her residency in Basel took place mid May – June 2023

The Museum der Kulturen Basel (MKB), one of five public museums in Canton Basel-Stadt is the largest anthropological museum in Switzerland and one of the most eminent of its kind in Europe. The MKB collections are renowned throughout the world and include over 340,000 objects, around 50,000 historical photographs, and roughly 200,000 documentary images. It collects and exhibits works and objects from around the world for the purpose of raising awareness and understanding for all cultures. Preserving the collections is just as much part of the MKB’s tasks as doing research on them. Findings are imparted by means of exhibitions, events, and publications. With its exhibitions and events, MKB seeks to enrich cultural life and awareness for all forms of culture. MKB publishes the findings of its research projects, thus making them accessible to a wider audience. They also feed into exhibitions and public events at the museum such as the gallery talk series: “Grasping anthropology”

On June 7th, 2023, Burgos, in conversation with Oceania curator Beatrice Voirol participated in the artist talk: New York – Mariwai: Werke einer Kunstkooperation (works from an art cooperation) as a part of “Grasping anthropology.”

In conjunction with the talk, Burgos offered an interactive workshop with collaborator Betsy Green, an expert in 19th century photographic development techniques, on the cyanotype process where they presented the results of the research and artistic residency at the museum as well as a program of short films which highlighted her work and interaction with the Kwoma people of Mariwai village Papua New Guinea.

_______________________________________________________

Kwoma Village, April 2023

Valued artifacts were photographed in Switzerland, then rendered in a cyanotype “blue painting” process in Mariwai Village, Papua New Guinea with local artists. By sourcing directly from the object reserves of the Museum der Kulturen, Basel, Shiva Lynn Burgos creates a direct link between the Collection and the Kwoma, the Kwoma back to the Collection.

In addition, Shiva introduced three other methods of blue painting to the village, integrating stencils of local symbols and photogram techniques using their body adornments and bones, and pure photogenic painting. These, in turn have been brought back to Museum der Kulturen where new works using the collection are currently being produced for the Shadow Energies series in which the artist continues to capture the spiritual essence of these special objects.

_______________________________________________________

Power, Protection, Currency, 2020

Working widely with ‘alternative’ photographic techniques the artist Shiva Lynn Burgos revisits the historic process of cyanotyping. First used nearly 150 years ago, the cyanotype was formerly described as a shadowgraph by the pioneering and perhaps first known female photographer Anna Atkins to document her findings in the natural world, Photographs of British Algae :Cyanotype Impressions. The process involves painting a ferric salt solution onto watercolour paper. Placing the subject then exposing
to sunlight or an ultra violet light source results in the brilliant Prussian blue hue. The spiritual and celestial colour provokes an ethereal and emotional attraction.

The painterly, alchemical ritual involved in the production echoes her experiences imbedded with the Kwoma people of Papua New Guinea. The artist has been inducted into the Kiava clan where artmaking is connected to the ritual washing of objects to attract the energy of spirits and ancestors. The resulting series POWER, PROTECTION, CURRENCY is a device to capture the shadow energy of precious objects the artist was given or collected in Papua New Guinea. For example, the feather crown of her father Chief Colin, amulets, bones, shell money and pre-historic stone tools. The interactions between chance, intuition, and inductive logic are inherent. The objects themselves are represented by a lack of colour and manifest as negative space. We are confronted by the absence of the object and therefore, the artist reminds us of the temporality and fragility of indigenous cultures themselves.