Edson Chagas / Angola

Angola born 1977

Tipo Passe, 2014, is a series that addresses questions of history, culture and identity. The artist’s birthplace of Angola was subjected to colonial rule by the Portuguese from 1575 until independence in 1975. The local population’s culture and traditions were largely disregarded and ‘unseen’ by the European colonialists. The striking masks depicted here are borrowed from private collections in Angola: removed from their original context, they are stripped of their meaning and transformed into decorative objects, hiding the identities and individual characteristics of the sitters.

The images in this series by Edson Chagas are photographed in the style of passport photographs; the series title, Tipo Passe, is Portuguese for passport. Chagas has used this format, perhaps the most common form of photography, and transformed it into large-scale portraits. A globally recognised form of identification and the fundamental document to enable migration and movement across borders, the passport photograph has an increased significance in the twenty-first century as refugees move across borders in numbers that have not been seen for decades.

BIO

Chagas has exhibited regularly in Africa, Europe and the United States since 2010. In 2013 he was awarded the Golden Lion for his work in the Angolan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and was recently included in Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.