About
Andrew Ananda Voogel (b. 1983, Los Angeles, California) processes the poetics of time through the lens of a post-colonial imaginary. Working with sculpture, photography, drawing and moving image, his work explores an expanded moment of personal and perceptual passage.
Voogel is a graduate of the University of California Santa Cruz (BA, Department of Literature) and the San Francisco Art Institute (MFA, Photography). He has lectured and researched extensively at international institutions, including the University of California Berkeley, Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation, United Nations Institute for Training and Research, UNESCO Creative Cities Forum and the University of California, Santa Cruz.
He has been a resident artist at KHOJ International Artist Association in New Delhi, Modern Art Projects South Africa and the Gyeonggi Creation Center in South Korea. He is a two time nominee for San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s SECA Award and in 2014 he received the Outstanding Graduate Student Award in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute.
In 2018, Voogel completed his first public art intervention in the form of a vibrating prayer bowl in Yeoncheon County, South Korea at a heavily militarized point where North and South Korea are separated by the Imjin River. In 2021, he installed two beacons at an old military compound alongside the DMZ in Paju South Korea. The beacons, facing each other respectively flashed a red warning signal each time a human life passed due to the increasing effects of air pollution globally.
In 2023, at the invitation of the East Coast Land Art Festival, Voogel had the honor to sculpt and install the Cosmic Gate, an archway whose core is constructed from waste plastic collected from local beaches and sits atop a hill on Lyudao Island, Taiwan.
Amongst his deepest influences, Voogel sites the writings of the Barbadian Poet Kamau Brathwaite (1930-2020) and the Chilean-American Artist Alfredo Jaar.
Solo Exhibitions (Selection)
2018 Weight of Separation, Project88, Mumbai
2015 Middle-Passage, Project 88, Mumbai
Black Water, YoungProjects Gallery, Los Angeles
Record of Exile, Museum of the Peninsula, Burlingame
Group Exhibitions (Selection)
2022 Autopoesis, Recognizing Kin Across Antipodal Topologies, Oyoun, Berlin 2021
Force Majeure and Anthropocene, Old Dora Observatory, DMZ, R.O.K.
2021 Composition XXII, FeltSpace, Adelaide
2019 Ocean New Messengers, Jeju Museum of Contemporary Art
2018 Line of Flight, Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa
Inspirations in Indian Textiles, 1947-2017, Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur
Dhaka Art Summit, Bearing Points, Dhaka
Turn of the Tide, Khoj International Artists Association, New Delhi
2017 Smokey Signals from the Groot Karoo, Circa Gallery, Cape Town
Deliberate Time, Goa Sunaparanta Centre for the Arts, Goa
2016 8688, Project88, Mumbai
On-Site Festival, Taipei
Separation, Te Uru Waitakere Museum, Auckland
Coriolis Effect, Khoj International Artists Association, New Delhi
2016 Manifesta 11, Performance Program, Zurich
Frieze New York, Project 88, New York
Afterimages, Stadt Museum Kunstsammlung, Jena, Germany
Growing Sea, Busan Sea Festival, Busan
Processing the Archive, UC Berkeley, Berkeley
Changjiang International Photography & Video Biennale, Chongqing
2014. Whorled Explorations, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi
Night Light, SOMArts, San Francisco
Principal MFA Show, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco
2013. Borderlines, Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco
Four Core Chambers, Martina Johnston Gallery, Berkeley
Permanent Public Installations
2023 Cosmic Gate, East Coast Land Arts Festival, Taitung County, Taiwan
2018 Resonant Form I, DMZ, Yeoncheon County, South Korea
Collections
Modern Art Projets South Africa
Awards/Residencies
2018 SFMOMA, SECA Award Nominee, San Francisco
2017 Modern Art Projects South Africa Residency, Richmond, South Africa
2016 Coriolis Effect, Residency, KHOJ International Workshop, New Delhi
2015 SFMOMA, SECA Award Nominee, San Francisco
2014 Outstanding Graduate Student Award Photography, SFAI, San Francisco
2013 San Francisco Art Institute MFA Fellowship, San Francisco
Selected Press
Finding New Bearings in Uncertain Times, Al Jazeera
The Ties that Bind, Indian Express
Across the Black Water, Indian Express