Iva Jankovic & Antonio Jose Guzman (Messengers of the Sun) in front of their work, Orbital Mechanics at the Venice Biennale (2024). Photo: Arianna Carotta, courtesy of Messengers of the Sun Iva Jankovic
Iva Jankovic is a Dutch-Yugoslav visual artist. Based in Amsterdam, she creates in Nederland, Gujarat and Serbia. Merging her traditional fine arts education with crafts she transforms ideas into performance pieces, installations and unique garments.
Together with Antonio Guzman, they form the multidisciplinary artist duo, Messengers of the Sun. Their collaborative practice investigates the legacies of colonialism, migration, and cultural hybridity through the intersection of textile, sound, and performance. Working together since 2016, their installations create immersive environments where sacred materials, ancestral knowledge, and advanced technologies converge.
Central to their work is the reinterpretation of indigo, a plant and pigment historically tied to colonial trade routes, labour exploitation, and spiritual symbolism across the African Diaspora. Guzman and Jankovic use indigo-dyed textiles as carriers of memory and resistance, embedding abstract DNA sequences and intercultural patterns into their fabric designs. These textiles, printed at the Ajrakh studio of Sufiyan Khatri in Ajrakhpur, India, are produced using 4,000-year-old manual dyeing techniques passed down through generations. Through this process, the artists draw direct material and symbolic links between South Asian craft traditions and Black Atlantic histories. Their sonic environments extend these connections by layering diasporic sound traditions with contemporary electronic experimentation. Using dub, punk, Afro-Caribbean rhythms, and Senegalese drums, their compositions evoke feelings of belonging and exile, echoing the complex emotional terrain of migration.
Exhibitions
