In the Hinterlands the stone cannot teach,
And if it did, it wouldn’t teach anything;
There one does not learn the stone, there the stone,
A birth stone, is buried within the soul.

[João Cabral de Melo Neto,  A educação pela pedra]

How many stones make up our lives? How much sky makes up our ground? We imagine the immanence of the stone: that which it withholds, its impenetrable interiority, its invisible mutability, the material manifestation of the divine. We consider the sky’s transcendence: what the sky projects onto the imagination, the immaterial, the path beyond. Yet, there’s the transcendence of the stone: the stone that knows itself to be a stone, the throw. And the sky’s immanence: the crumbling utopia.

Through screen printing, fabrics, embroidery, found objects, and film frames, Dreaming Dashes, Ana Hupe’s solo show, weaves thoughts on immanence and transcendence, the mystic surrounding shapes, and the revolution of movement. Each work is a story brought to life by the encounter with a sign or the silence between the lines of a text, to be combined with experiences the artist uncovers during her travels. Between the stone and the sky, we find the entanglements of colonial relationships between Brazil, West Africa, and Europe – particularly Germany, where the artist lives. Hupe uses critical fabulation as a methodological guide, a process that links historical research to the “power of invention” - as writer Saidiya Hartman puts it – to recount forgotten facts and facets of people’s lives, opening new pathways for historical reparations that go beyond the object itself.

Excerpts from curatorial text by Juliana Gontijo

Full text available here: http://anahupe.com/wp-content/uploads/DreamingDashesAHupe_JGontijoENG.pdf
Texto curatorial em português aqui: http://anahupe.com/wp-content/uploads/A3_DO_CEU_E_DA_PEDRA-2.pdf