Renan De Menezes Anan

“My artistic practice explores identity, heritage and multiculturalism through the creation of sculptural artifacts. Combining traditional materials, such as metal and wood, and mixing in contemporary digital techniques, I explore provenance, personal experience and the intersections between different traditions, materials, experiences and cultures. In this way, I create completely new original objects – the result of meticulous craftsmanship and my thorough research.”

In Renan De Menezes Anan’s world, alloying is more than just a technique – it is a thought, a movement, a way of being. When metals are forged together, something new emerges. Something stronger, which can be both malleable and flexible. This process also applies in the encounter between other materials, and in a transferred sense; in the encounter between hands and matter, between objects and history, and between the past and the present.

But above all, the encounter occurs at the intersection between cultures, rituals and symbols – the traces of life at different times and in different geographies. Amid the friction and the fusion, something new appears that seems stronger than the old. Perhaps man has always mirrored himself in the other, borrowed shapes, colours and meanings, and then combined and merged.

Anan’s work manifests itself in printmaking and sculptures, but everything can be seen as a kind of self-portrait: Roots that wind their way from Europe and Japan to Brazil, and now onwards to Sweden. These roots have been joined together. Myth and matter, symbol and substance, genes and languages. Cult objects, fragments, narratives… there are certainly common features in the expressions of cultures that echo through history and across the world. Perhaps we all share a common core. Then, a symbol of Brazil’s indigenous people can whisper to Japanese ornamentation, in an embrace in the middle of a Nordic forest.