‘I see hidden codes within the everyday’: Sandra Poulson’s first museum exhibition explores material histories of global exchange

Este quarto parece uma República! (This bedroom looks like a republic!), on view until 6 October at MoMA PS1 in Queens, marks the Angolan artist Sandra Poulson’s first museum exhibition. It arrives at a very poignant moment. Taking an archaeological approach to materials, Poulson creates installations that explore how symbols embedded in common objects sustain global power structures—a theme fit for the new era of trade protectionism.

The PS1 installation restages a work originally commissioned by Jahmek Contemporary Art, a commercial gallery in Angola’s capital city of Luanda, and presented at Sadie Coles HQ as part of Condo London 2025, the long-running collaborative initiative that pools resources by pairing galleries abroad with local hosts. Drawing from her interest in signs and how they intersect with material histories, Poulson’s work interrogates cultural and economic exchange shaped by postcolonial legacies and globalisation.

The Art Newspaper: The exhibition title comes from a Portuguese phrase your father used to say to you. How have you expanded this personal expression into a broader reflection on sociopolitical dynamics?

Sandra Poulson: As a child, I didn’t know how this idea of a republic could relate to untidiness. I asked my dad where the sentence came from, and he said it references the 1910s when Portugal became a republic, with Angola remaining an Ultramarine Province [Província Ultramarina de Angola]. In these first few years of the republic, Portugal had so many presidents [nine in the first decade], so the phrase relates to being a subject to an imperial organisation but recognising its shortcomings at the same time. This is a core idea of my practice—how I relate micro examples to the macro stories to see hidden codes within the domestic and the everyday.

Your installations for the 2023 Sharjah Architecture Triennial and the 2024 Venice Biennale explored how dust acts as a signifier of mobility in Luanda. By contrast, the PS1 work centres wood. How does this material relate to Angola’s past and present?

The assemblages are a combination between found furniture from the Netherlands and elements in wood made by me. In Amsterdam, there is a wood library within the Royal Tropical Institute, which is filled with samples from earlier Dutch territories, including Angola. Wealthy Dutch people could order trees from these wood samples to be cut in the colonies and delivered to the Netherlands to be turned into furniture.

There is also a massive open-air wood workshop in Luanda, outside of Kikolo Market, where many young men hand-make furniture, because it’s cheaper than importing it. The headboards of these beds will have a Nike or an Apple logo. I asked them if this is something that the customer asked for, and they explained that it was essentially an artistic signature. I became very interested in the work that went not only into construction but the supposed signatures that, for me, felt incredibly out of place.

I’m quite interested in these deliberate inaccuracies, the way that objects get dislocated and renaturalised somewhere, to then operate in seemingly silent ways to redefine our relationship with aspiration, power and economic ability.

Can you say more about your use of institutional logos, such as those of the European Union and the Universal Church?

In Angola, it’s common to distribute T-shirts with logos of political parties or corporations as a free form of propaganda. But people won’t wear them outside, because it presupposes endorsement of the party or business. So the shirts tend to be used for sleeping and end up in the most intimate place: the bedroom. They operate a bit like a Trojan horse. They are a gift, but they come with an unspoken contract of naturalisation of the symbol and what is behind the symbol.

The cultural theorist Fredric Jameson wrote in 2005: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”—a line that feels more prescient than ever. Where do you see the archaeological impulse operating in our current moment of acceleration and globalisation?

This archaeological-impulse-leading aspect of my practice comes from resources that precede capitalism. It’s very important to understand capitalism as a man-made device that requires continuous subscription and validation, a bit like archaeology itself. So when I think about archaeological processes, I think about unravelling these man-made devices that redefine people’s needs.

There has been renewed attention to the fragility of the global supply chain in the face of tariffs. Has the current climate shifted how you think about economic power relations?

My approach isn’t shifted by the current economic environment in a directly responsive way. I mostly draw on historical environments, and I analyse asymmetric power relations by looking into intimate formulas of power maintenance, often by highlighting the semiotics of those formulas.

Perhaps there’s a renewed visibility and urgency, but I would place that renewal in the past few years rather than the past few weeks. It was inevitable that the West would come to relate to this economic asymmetry, but there are nuances that we miss when we globalise and group in terms of hemispheres. If anything, the fragility of the global supply chain is something that is hundreds of years old.

• Sandra Poulson: Este quarto parece uma República!, MoMa PS1, 24 April–6 October