Ana Silva: A Contemplation of Emptiness

During this year’s Art Basel Paris, the work of Portuguese and Angolan artist Ana Silva caught our eye. The artist’s work was showcased at A Gentil Carioca‘s booth, a Brazilian contemporary art gallery. IRK Magazine got the chance to interview Ana Silva about “A Contemplation of Emptiness”. This new series explores the beauty that resides within the empty space of nature.

IRK: In your most recent collection “The Contemplation of Emptiness”, you explore the creative power that resides in the silent pulse of nature. The current world is full of distractions that make it difficult to rest in a space of silence. Does this work emerge as an escape from this world? What resides in emptiness?

I don’t consider “The Contemplation of Emptiness” an escape from the world, but rather a way of questioning it. Throughout my artistic journey, I have sought to create a language that allows me to reflect on our relationship with nature, memory, and the fragility of existence. In this collection, this investigation leads me to silence, suspension, and what remains invisible.

We live in a society marked by excess, speed, and consumption, where there seems to be a constant need to fill all spaces. However, I believe that it is precisely in the vacuum that we can recover the ability to observe, feel, and understand. To me, emptiness does not mean absence. It is a space of possibility, where life silently transforms and where nature reveals its extraordinary capacity for regeneration. I am interested in what happens without our control or even witnessing it: the growth of a root, the transformation of matter, the persistence of life in the face of adversity.

My practice, which uses embroidery, textiles, and natural elements, allows me to work with this tension between presence and absence, visibility and invisibility. The transparency of the materials and the delicacy of the gesture create a space where the work seems to exist between the physical world and a more contemplative dimension.

After so many years of work, I understand more and more that creating does not necessarily mean adding. Sometimes it means removing, letting breathe, and allowing matter to find its own expression. What resides in the void is, perhaps, what we have not yet been able to name: memory, possibility, origin, and the very essence of life.

IRK: Having been born in Angola and currently living in Portugal, how have these two different cultures impacted your artistic expression?

I was born in Angola and live in Portugal, two geographical locations that are part of my history and identity. My relationship with these territories, their memories, and their different cultural realities has contributed to how I observe and interpret the world. Angolan heritage occupies an important place in my artistic sensibility, particularly in relation to ancestry, nature, memory, and the symbolic dimension of objects. The connection between land and identity interests me, specifically how we transmit our inheritance to future generations.

Throughout my career, I have sought to transform these references into a contemporary artistic language, without necessarily resorting to the literal representation of African traditions. I do not want to illustrate a culture. Instead, I want to understand how new forms of expression keep cultural memory alive. Textiles have become a privileged territory for this research. Embroidery, lace, prints, and materials carry stories of work, knowledge transmission, and collective experiences. They are also elements that allow me to question the invisibility of certain knowledge, particularly that historically associated with women.

Living and working in Portugal allows me to establish a continuous dialogue between my origins and the context in which I develop my artistic practice. However, I don’t see these two geographies as opposing realities. They are dimensions of my experience that coexist and mutually enrich each other. My work is born from this encounter between memory, experience, and artistic investigation. My origins shape who I am, but they do not limit my work. It is from this personal place that I seek to build a language capable of engaging with different audiences and international contexts.

IRK: Did your artistic identity as an Angolan woman living in Portugal build organically, or was it something actively sought and constantly negotiated with the outside world?

My artistic identity was formed primarily organically, through experiences, memories, and questions that arose along my journey. I didn’t start with a program designed to build a specific cultural identity. Through my work, I discovered the elements that truly interested me and that ultimately defined my language. I was born in Angola and live in Portugal, and this experience is part of my history. However, geography and origin do not limit my artistic identity. Over the years, I have developed my own research around materials, gestures, nature, and human relationships, building a language that seeks to transcend cultural boundaries.

International experience also showed me that different contexts change how people interpret an artist’s work. There is sometimes a tendency to categorize artists through their origin, especially when they work with non-Western cultural references. I understand the importance of historical and cultural contextualization, but I consider it fundamental that this interpretation does not limit the freedom of the work.

My professional experience, including the presence of my work in international museum collections, has reinforced my conviction that a personal artistic language can establish dialogues beyond its circumstances of origin. I do not feel the need to choose between different cultural references, nor to permanently justify my identity. I recognize the different dimensions of my history, but I claim the freedom to transform, question, and reinvent them through creation. Today, I see identity as a territory in motion, defined not only by where we are born or the references we inherit, but also by the choices we make and how we interpret the world. It is in this space of freedom that I situate my artistic practice.

IRK: Your work contains a series of representations and symbols that refer to an ancestral Africa. How does the recovery of historical cultural heritage support contemporary and future artistic production?

I believe that memory is fundamental to understanding the present and imagining the future. In my work, ancestry is not understood as a static reference or as an attempt to recover an idealized past. It is a living presence that can be questioned and reinterpreted in light of contemporary issues. I am particularly interested in the relationship between individual and collective memory, between objects and the stories they carry. Often, seemingly insignificant or fleeting objects hold a history that deserves preservation.

This concern is also manifested in my research on textiles and their environmental and social impact. The textile industry, mass production, and throwaway culture raise profound questions. Questions about consumption, the exploitation of natural resources, and the inequalities that cross different geographies, including African communities that receive large quantities of textile waste. By working with repurposed materials, such as raffia bags, and exploring techniques like embroidery and lacemaking, I seek to create new possibilities for interpreting materials and practices that carry social, economic, and cultural histories. The transformation of these materials is not merely an aesthetic choice. It’s a way of questioning the value we attribute to things, and the production systems that sustain our daily lives.

I believe that ancestral knowledge can contribute to a fundamental reflection on the future. It is not only about returning to models of the past, but also recognizing that there are forms of knowledge and organization of life that help us question the idea of ​​progress based exclusively on growth and consumption. Cultural heritage only remains truly alive when it can be reinterpreted. It is in this continuity between past, present, and future that I find one of the most important dimensions of my work.

IRK: How do you obtain the materials for your creations? What techniques do you use?

Materials occupy a central place in my artistic practice. I don’t consider them merely supports for a pre-defined idea. Often, it is the materials themselves, with their physical characteristics, their history, and their possibilities for transformation, that determine the path of the work. Throughout my career, I have developed research around textiles, using embroidery, lace, patterns, and different forms of intervention on the material.

I also work with reused materials, such as raffia bags, and with natural elements, including dried roots and flowers. I am particularly interested in working with materials that carry meanings beyond their original function. A raffia bag, for example, can be associated with transportation, commerce, and the circulation of goods. When I incorporate it into a work, I seek to displace it from this functional context and give it a new aesthetic and symbolic existence.

Embroidery is one of the fundamental techniques of my language. Its relationship with time, repetition, and manual work allows me to construct surfaces, design structures, and explore different relationships between design, color, and matter. It is a process that demands patience and precision, but also offers enormous freedom for experimentation.

I am equally interested in the historical and social dimension of these techniques. Traditional systems of artistic recognition frequently undervalue embroidery and lacemaking, manual crafts that women typically perform to transmit knowledge. By incorporating them into a contemporary practice, I seek to expand their expressive possibilities and question the established hierarchies between different forms of artistic production.

The choice of materials is also related to the environmental concerns that permeate my practice. I want to explore waste, reuse, and the transformation of residual matter into objects with a new presence and meaning. My process does not follow a single formula. Each project requires its own investigation, in which materials, techniques, space, and concept mutually influence each other. In the end, I seek to make the work transcend the physical dimension of the materials and open a space for reflection on nature, memory, the human condition, and the contradictions of the world in which we live.

Ana Silva

Ana Silva is an artist born in Angola who lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal. She expresses herself through sculptures and paintings using a variety of materials. Embroidery, pigments, acrylic paint, and fabrics are elements that compose and give shape to her art. Ana finds inspiration in the lives of Angolan women, in memories of her childhood, and in experiences marked by spirituality.

In 2027, she will participate in the 17th Sharjah Biennial, held in the United Arab Emirates. In 2026, the artist held the solo exhibition “Eau. Ana Silva” at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAMeC) in Bergamo, Italy. She participated in “Tomar a palavra / Reescrever o mapa” at the Museu da Língua Portuguesa in São Paulo. She was also in “Améfrica: Diasporic Connections in the Jorge M. Pérez Collection” at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain. Additionally, the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea in Lisbon, Portugal, featured her work in the exhibition “Linhas Cruzadas” (Entangled Lines). In 2025, she presented the solo exhibition “Contemplação do vazio” at A Gentil Carioca in São Paulo, Brazil. She also participated in the group exhibition “Whispers from Tides and Forests” at Kunsthaus Baselland in Münchenstein, Basel.