Shortlist 2018 Hong Kong
Zac Langdon-Pole was announced as the seventh BMW Art Journey winner during Art Basel in Basel 2018. Inspired by ancient celestial tracing, Langdon-Pole's journey questions the position of humans as the center of the world.
Langdon-Pole’s journey “Sutures of the Sky,” as his proposal is titled, will take him later this year across a world that humans and birds have been navigating through millennia. He will follow the flight paths of birds like the white stork or the arctic tern, traveling along the earth’s axis where the Northern and Southern Hemispheres’ summers intersect. Migrating birds cover some of the longest distances traveled by any living being. Their routes have guided the Polynesian pathfinders across the seas.
Migrating birds cover some of the longest distances traveled by any living being.
Their routes have guided the Polynesian pathfinders across the seas.
Inspired by this ancient celestial tracing, Langdon-Pole's journey questions the position of humans as the center of the world.
Weaving through Central Europe, Southern Africa, and the Pacific Islands of Samoa and Hawaii, his Art Journey seeks to understand how culture intersects with the science of celestial mapping—and from there flows into larger existential inquiries about who we are and how we are situated in the world.
Hong Kong 2018 Shorlisted Artists in addition to Zac Langdon-Pole
Gala Porras Kim, Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles
The Los Angeles-Based Gala Porras Kim “takes a material we often take for granted—stone—to investigate archeology and its relationship to truth,” the jury noted. “Her proposal is an ambitious look at mapping seminal and recently-discovered ancient stone sculptures—man-made and natural—across multiple geographies and moments in time. By employing satellite technology alongside other techniques, she has sought to further extract histories that are always a combination of both fact and fiction.
Ali Kazim, Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai
Similarly, Ali Kazim, who lives and works in Lahore, Pakistan, “seeks to uncover relationships between history, culture, and the invisible workings of nature and time. His approach is invested with a desire to reexamine the territory that exists between material reality and human imagination. In visiting actual archaeological sites and seeing actual objects from Gandharan culture that extends across Asia and Europe, Kazim proposed to merge these visual resources with his own artistic language to yield a unique set of drawings and sculptures.”
