Manuela Sambo - Roots
31 January—28 February 2026
Opening: 30 January 2026, 6—9 pm

• Press Release: EN / DE
• Manuela Sambo: Works / Portfolio (PDF) / CV (PDF)
• Curtis Talwst Santiago: Works / Portfolio (PDF) / CV (PDF)

Michael Janssen Gallery is pleased to announce the new exhibition ‘Roots’ by Angolan artist Manuela Sambo. For this exhibition, Manuela Sambo has invited Canadian artist Curtis Talwst Santiago to create the sound installation "The Hummed Inheritance: Hymn for Underground Time," which will be presented for the first time on the occasion of the opening. We cordially invite you to experience these profound works and the artistic dialogue between the two artists.

At the centre of the show is a monumental mask sculpture that imposingly spans two floors and permeates the gallery space. This impressive installation symbolises the unstoppable spread of roots – independent of time and space. Roots as a metaphor for invisible but nevertheless powerful forces. The mask embodies not only the increasing interpenetration of different cultures in the present, where African and Western traditions interweave, but also personal elements, such as her spiritual inner life and cultural roots, which are becoming increasingly present in her.

In addition to this sculptural work, the paintings selected for the exhibition also address the themes of origin and identity, creation and destruction, and traditional collective and universal spiritual knowledge. Sambo's more recent works are characterised by questions about these aspects, some of which go beyond her own cultural sphere to address universal human conflicts, such as the fate and attitudes of people, especially women, in repressive systems and in war. This takes place on a highly intuitive level, in which symbols enter the picture that the artist uses more intuitively than consciously. Noteworthy are paintings such as Wake Up, Child!, which depicts a genderless being holding a motionless child in its arms. In another work, two beings – one female and one cat-like with a human face – encounter each other in a protective bubble: eyeless, without direct eye contact, in a non-verbal, deeply spiritual communication.

Manuela Sambo, born in Luanda (Angola) and a long-time resident of Berlin, combines African mask traditions with influences from Western art history, which she explores in her artistic work. In 2020, she received the Falkenrot Prize in conjunction with an exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien. In 2024, the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt/Main (MMK) acquired numerous works for its renowned collection.

Born in 1979 to Trinidadian parents who immigrated to Edmonton, Canada, Curtis Talwst Santiago grew up immersed in Caribbean-Canadian culture. His early influences included music, dance, and art, shaped by his family and community. Through his paintings and sculptural works, Santiago seeks to translate these multifaceted experiences into color and space, creating compositions that visualize the tensions, harmonies, moods, and fluidity of existence across time and place.

A catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition.

Catalogue text for the exhibition “ROOTS” by Manuela Sambo by Julia Rosenbaum, art historian and art advisor

The exhibition “ROOTS” by Manuela Sambo at Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin (30 January – 28 February 2026), centres on a monumental mask that serves as a physical, intellectual, and spiritual axis traversing the gallery space. The nearly two-metre-high sculpture “ROOTS” (2026), crafted inter alia from synthetic resin and papier-mâché, is extended by a beard- or hair-like entanglement of raw, darkly dyed hemp material. This sprawls in sweeping coils across the floor, evoking ropes, threads of life, or root systems – archetypal symbols of growth, connection, temporality, and continuity. As metaphor, the roots point to invisible yet profoundly efficacious forces: ancestors, memory, dream, the unconscious, and spiritual presence. In a postcolonial reading, they simultaneously allude to historical lines of violence and transgenerational experiences that persist without being immediately visible.

The mask is at once origin and point of departure. It poses fundamental questions about identity, culture, and tradition as forces that remain enduring at their core, yet are inherently mutable. Despite colonial violence, political ruptures, and forced migration, these forces endure, transform, intermingle with new influences, and thereby open up novel spaces of thought and existence. Formally, Sambo draws upon an archaic visual language whose roots lie deep in Angolan mask-making traditions. From a ritual-theoretical perspective, the mask is not mere representation but an agent: it marks the threshold between interior and exterior, visible and invisible, individual and collective.

The interweaving of African and Western pictorial traditions directly mirrors Manuela Sambo’s own biography – experiences of war in Angola, migration to the GDR, and life within a Europe shaped by both socialism and its aftermath. These experiences do not serve as mere narrative backdrop but constitute a dynamic field in which identity emerges as an ongoing process of negotiation between origin and arrival.

The paintings in the exhibition extend this discourse into a distinctly painterly pictorial space. Works such as “I Hope you Remember”, “Il Bambolo”, “Casa das Tintas”, “Kahala”, among others (2020–2026), engage with creation and destruction, consciousness and the unconscious, dissolution and redemption. Particularly striking is the tondo “Wake Up, Child!” (2026), which references the Angolan wartime period and depicts a gender-ambiguous figure cradling a child. The image condenses existential ambivalences of life and death, responsibility, powerlessness, and individual agency within repressive systems into a powerful icon.

Further works, such as “Libertas” (2020), address rootedness in both its literal and metaphorical senses: one figure appears to grow forth from the earth, while another woman encounters a cat-like creature with a human countenance. Without direct eye contact, enveloped in a protective sphere, a quiet, non-verbal communication arises. The cat emerges as a mediator between consciousness and the unconscious, this world and the beyond.

Characteristic of Sambo’s painting is the deliberate reduction to clear, archetypal forms and figures whose eyes lack detailed irises – a conscious gesture of inward vision. Ornamental lines on skin and body function as energetic protective layers or vital currents. Colour here does not serve mimetic depiction but expresses inner states and spiritual qualities.

Femininity in Manuela Sambo’s oeuvre appears not as a fixed identity but as a creative, primordial force. African conceptions of motherhood, magic, and primal femininity intertwine with reflections on European Marian iconography, particularly the Maria lactans. In this charged convergence of remembrance and transformation, “ROOTS” unfolds an imagistic world in which the past is never closed but continually puts forth new roots.

Image:
Manuela Sambo, Kranzmaske, Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst, ca. 1988, Pappmaché, Draht, Holz, Strick, Ölfarbe, 125 x 80 x 55 cm (Foto: Axel Schneider)