Juan Orrantia makes photographic works concerned with questions of representation, perception and history. Embracing photography’s uncertainty and contingency, he works through the destabilizing possibilities of colour, archival images, and the photobook. Ongoing work considers colour and histories of othering. He is also developing a photobook on anticolonial legacies and the disruption of archival structures, silences and forms of concealment.
Last year, he published Like Stains of Red Dirt (Dalpine) after having been awarded the Fiebre Dummy Award. His VerdeRojo will be published this year as a result of the 2019 Centro de Fotografia de Montevideo Latin American Photobook Award. Other self-published books are in collections of the Smithsonian Museum of African Art Library, Biblioteca de Arte Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, and The Tierney Foundation. Reviews of his work have appeared in Aperture, Nearest Truth, British Journal of Photography, and Africa is a Country, among others.
Juan was born in Colombia and lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, and has lectured at universities and photo institutions. He holds an MFA in Photography from Hartford Art School and a doctorate in visual anthropology.
Recent reviews/interviews:
May 12, 2020
The CHR's A.W.Mellon Artist in Residence in Image and postdoctoral fellow, Kitso Lelliott was invited by the Kunstverein Braunschweig , Germany to create a work of video installations for the exhibition, THE FACULTY OF SENSING – Thinking With, Through, and by Anton Wilhelm Amo.
Mar 19, 2020
Kitso Lelliot is an Andrew W. Mellon Artist in Residence at the Centre for Humanities Research. The show is at The Södertälje Konsthall and will run from the 7th March until the 10th of May.
Jul 9, 2019
PRODUCING IN THE PRESENT, PRESSURING THE PAST, FOR AN IMMEDIATE FUTURE. The key to the future lies in the past. The archive of the past is our immediate future. The question is not that we merely take and place the archive. We are not merely inheritors of a culture but its inherent makers.
