Luana Vitra: Amulets

Opening Reception
Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 6-8pm

Luana Vitra's practice is deeply intertwined with her home region of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The mineral-rich state is known for its historical export of gold through forced labour and for its current prominence in the extractive iron mining industry. Through an abstract language that encompasses drawing, painting, performance, sculpture, and installation, her work is interested in the metallurgical and transformative charge of minerals and their capacity for metamorphosis, often creating a dialogue between the natural and industrial manifestations of materials.

Her SculptureCenter commission, Amulets, follows a series of recent projects focused on channeling the spiritual dimension of natural matter such as stone, clay, and sand, arranging them in detailed configurations encoded in symbolism. Vitra describes mineral stones as a means of “receiving, storing, transforming and establishing energies” – a space for communicating with spirits. Her practice is rooted both in physics and chemistry, and the complex philosophical and spiritual traditions of the African diaspora, shaped by a transatlantic convergence of cultures. The religions and cosmological systems that originated here regard the land as a spiritualised ecology, in which earth, stone, water, sunlight, fire, iron, air, mountains, and plants are seen as ancestors.

For Amulets, Vitra temporarily makes visible the threshold between the physical and spiritual presence of minerals through an energetically directed environment, presenting minerals as ritual manifestation. They take shape in a new set of sculptures that include tall iron totems wrapped in white fabric and detailed with amarrações: knots that symbolise the act of sealing the gesture of intention at the moment of invoking a spell, or as a way of enclosing it within. This fabric also appears in clay pots that carry hidden elements as devotional offerings, honoring the notion that mysteries must remain protected. The installation will be wrapped in a wide curtain of white feathers that transforms the tone of the building through an infusion of light, while evoking symbolic connections of protection.

Amulets reinforces Vitra's dedication to an aesthetic rooted in the spiritual. She invites visitors to look beyond sculptures’ material properties and its circulation as commodities within a capitalist economy, and to envision another dimension to which they belong. The mineral forms she conjures–often emerging first in dreams–become visual prayers, spiritual manifestation, or incantations.

Luana Vitra: Amulets is organized by Jovanna Venegas, Curator.

On the occasion of the exhibition, SculptureCenter will publish the first English-language catalog of the artist's work (to be released in spring 2025). It will include a commissioned essay by Gabi Ngcobo, Director, Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam; an interview between Luana Vitra and Diane Lima, an independent curator and writer based in New York; and a curatorial text by exhibition curator Jovanna Venegas. The publication is designed by Studio Lhooq.