Zac Langdon Pole’s Art Journey

The BMW Art Journey is a joint initiative of Art Basel and BMW that offers artists an opportunity to undertake a journey of creative discovery to a destination of their own choosing. Like a mobile studio, the BMW Art Journey can take an artist to almost anywhere in the world—to establish contacts, to forge perspectives, to envision and create new work. The BMW Art Journey is open to artists exhibited in the Discoveries sector of Art Basel in Hong Kong.

Zac Langdon-Pole’s Art Journey, titled Sutures of the Sky, has taken him across a world that humans and birds have been navigating for millennia. He followed the flight paths of birds like the white stork or the arctic tern, travelling along the earth's axis where the Northern and Southern Hemispheres' summers intersect. Migrating birds cover some of the longest distances travelled by any living being. Their routes have guided the Polynesian pathfinders across the seas.

Inspired by this ancient celestial tracing, the artist questions the position of humans as the centre of the world. Weaving through Central Europe, Southern Africa, and the Pacific Islands of Samoa and Hawaii, he seeks to understand how culture intersects with the science of celestial mapping—and from there flows into larger existential inquiries about who we are and how we are situated in the world.