Zac Langdon-Pole’s Art Journey Constellations has taken him across a world that humans and birds have been navigating through millennia. He followed the flight paths of birds like the white stork or the arctic tern, traveling along the earth’s axis where the Northern and Southern Hemispheres’ summers intersect. Migrating birds cover some of the longest distances traveled 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 center 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.

ZAC LANGDON-POLE (*1988, New Zealand) graduated from the University of Auckland, Elam School of Fine Arts and studied with Willem the Rooij at the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. The recipient of the Charlotte-Prinz Scholarship exhibited in Canada, Singapore, and Germany. He lives in Darmstadt and Berlin, Germany.

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 (*1988, New Zealand) graduated from the University of Auckland, Elam School of Fine Arts and studied with Willem the Rooij at the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. The recipient of the Charlotte-Prinz Scholarship exhibited in Canada, Singapore, and Germany. He lives in Darmstadt and Berlin, Germany.