Januario Jano – Mulele

Januário Jano – Mulele

First Belgium Solo Exhibition
4th September – 11th October 2025

Gallery Nosco is pleased to present Mulele, the first solo exhibition in Belgium by Angolan artist Januário Jano. Rooted in a deep exploration of textile as cultural artefact and living memory, Mulele takes its name from the Kimbundu word for cloth. It traces the intimate connection between body and memory through textile works that serve not merely as garments, but as active, liminal spaces of cultural resonance.

Originally worn by the Ambundu people, these textiles are reimagined as thresholds—neither fully clothing nor static object—charged with ancestral presence. Like a second skin, cast off yet still pulsing with meaning, Mulele disturbs the quiet familiarity of the domestic, transforming fabric into a medium of disruption, presence, and reflection.

Emerging from Jano’s ongoing research into Angola’s textile heritage, the exhibition explores weaving techniques, dyeing processes, and symbolic motifs to unearth their embedded meanings. These materials become vessels of Ambundu identity—carriers of Indigenous knowledge systems, resistant to colonial erasure, and critical in the negotiation between pre-colonial traditions and Christian influence.

By mapping historical trade routes and their socio-cultural reverberations, Jano positions textiles as dynamic conduits of memory and resilience—threads connecting past and present, the personal and the political.

Through these works, cultural identity is not just represented but embodied. Each piece is an act of remembering and reclaiming, engaging with issues of restitution, trauma, and representation. Mulele offers a meticulous, material-based excavation of history, revealing how textile production intertwines with the construction of self, ecological consciousness, and Angola’s complex heritage—locally rooted yet globally resonant.