BIENNALS: 33rd Bienal de São Paulo,Part I – dreamideamachine ART VIEW

Under the title “Affective Affinities” the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo focuses on questions around attention, the experience of the public and of the participating artists. Breaking away from the single-theme model, the Biennal features 12 solo projects selected by chief-curator Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro along with 7 group shows organized by invited artist-curators (Part II).

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Bienal de São Paulo Archive

“Elective“Affinities” the title of the 33rd Biennal de São Paulo refers to the novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe “Elective“Affinities” (1809) and the thesis “On the Affective Nature of Form in the Work of Art” (1949), by Mário Pedrosa. For this edition, alongside 12 projects chosen by Pérez-Barreiro, the curator invited seven artist-curators to conceive group shows with total freedom in the choice of the artists and the selection of artworks – the only requirement was that they also include artworks of their own authorship. Based on his interest in questions such as repetition, narrative and translation, Alejandro Cesarco presents “To Our Parents” which proposes questionings into how the past (history) simultaneously makes possible and frustrates potentials and how it can be rewritten by the artist’s work, a generator of differences on the basis of repetitions. Antonio Ballester Moreno approaches “common/sense” as a way to contextualize a universe based on the close relationship between biology and culture, with references to the history of abstraction and its interaction with nature, pedagogy and spirituality. Claudia Fontes bases her exhibition titled “The Slow Bird” on a fictional book of the same name, whose content is unknown. Fontes and the invited artists present artworks that activate the approximations between visual arts, literature and translation through experiences that propose an expanded temporality. All of the participants, with the exception of Roderick Hietbrink, have produced artworks especially for the show. For her exhibition “Stargazer II” Mamma Andersson has gathered a group of artists who have inspired her production as a painter. “I am interested in artists who work with melancholy and introspection as a way of life and form of survival,” states Andersson. Sofia Borges’ curatorship of “The Infinite Story of Things or the End of the Tragedy of One” is based on a reading of tragedy to investigate the limits of representation and the impossibility of language as a tool for mediating the real. In her exhibition project, the selection of pre-existing artworks is accompanied by specially commissioned works. One of the particularities of her proposal is its activation by a program of experiences throughout the run of the Bienal, carried out by invited artists who may or may not have artworks permanently installed at the exhibition. Waltercio Caldas has designed “The Appearances” as a space in which artworks by artists from various periods are confronted with works of his own authorship. “Since an artist’s production deals with countless questions that vary over time, I chose artworks that deviate from what is most known about each of them and from our outstanding for their value and specificity”. For her exhibition project, “always, never”, composed exclusively of especially commissioned artworks, Wura-Natasha Ogunji invited five artists from different backgrounds and nationalities to create, like her, new artworks in a collaborative and horizontal curatorial process. The six artists are presenting new artworks that explore space and place in relation to the body, to history and to architecture. Among the 12 individual projects chosen by the curator, three of them areposthumous homages to Aníbal López, Feliciano Centurión and Lucia Nogueira. Aníbal López, also known as A-1 53167, his ID number, was one of the pioneers of performance art in his country. His work, which includes video, performance, live act and urban interventions, among other forms of expression, has a strong political character and is concerned with questions of disputes about national borders, indigenous cultures, military abuses and even the art market. The show dedicated to him features video and photographic records of ephemeral actions carried out as a form of protest to the objectification and fetishization of art. The queer universe is delicately approached by Feliciano Centurión, who left his birth country, Paraguay, to live in Argentina, where he became a leading figure of the so-called Rojas generation the first artists to show at the gallery of the Centro Cultural Rector Ricardo Rojas, of the Universidad de Buenos Aires) until succumbing to HIV-related complications, at the age of 34. Born to a family of female embroiderers, the artist appropriated artisanal practices as a language to express elements of his personal history. Still little-known in Brazil, Goias State artist Lucia Nogueira developed an internationally recognized career and is an essential figure for understanding the British art of her time. Her sculptures and installations, the focus of the solo show devoted to her at the 33rd Bienal, subvert the utilitarianism of objects with subtle humor, both through the unusual association between elements as well as the wordplay constantly present in her titles, creating an atmosphere of strangeness and poetry. Individual projects by another nine artists, eight of whom are presenting especially commissioned works, complete Pérez-Barreiro’s selection. Of the group the only one showing a historical body of work is Siron Franco with a series of paintings “Césio/Rua 57”. In this series, Franco eternalizes the sense of horror and isolation caused by the radioactive accident that took place in 1987 in the Bairro Popular district, in his hometown, Goiânia, with the element Cesium 137. The 8 artists with specially commissioned projects have in common the development of artworks that do not fit within a thematic structure. lejandro Corujeira possesses a light and fluid formal conception, which seems to want to capture the movement of nature. Denise Milan has created sculptures and installations with large stones and crystals. At the 33rd Bienal, the artist shows for the first time a large installation based on these elements. Daily life serves as inspiration for the artworks by Maria Laet, who show a new video and by Vânia Mignone who presents new paintings that resonate with the lyricism of Brazilian popular music. Nelson Felix show a new work composed of three moments. The first two (absent in the exhibition space of the Bienal) are a physical action on the American continent that catalyzes the project and a subsequent piece that synthesizes the work as a whole, situated in a public space in the city of São Paulo. The third moment, shown in the Bienal Pavilion, consists of a series of sculptures conceived by the artist almost as a soundtrack for the entire project. The researches by Bruno Moreschi and Luiza Crosmanare related with the tradition of institutional criticism and are expressed in nontraditional artistic supports. With this project, Moreschi proposes an invitation to think about the Bienal in a nontraditional way through an archive of unofficial experiments, consisting of a series of documents resulting from actions unleashed by him. For her part, Crosman acts on practices that are constitutive of the Bienal, which, in her view, do not need to be immutable. Collaborations with Zazie Edições, Pedro Moraes and Negalê Jones appear not only as a means of connecting various people in a project, but as a means of maximizing their effects, thus dealing with the concept of scale. Based on a personal and poetic approach that combines a critical approach to institutions with poetic and narrative concerns, Tamar Guimarães presents a new video based on a reading of “Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas”, a seminal text by Brazilian author Machado de Assis, made in collaboration with professional and nonprofessional actors and adapted to the institutional context and history of the Fundação Bienal.

Info: Curator: Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, Invited artist-curators: Mamma Andersson, Antonio Ballester Moreno, Sofia Borges, Waltercio Caldas, Alejandro Cesarco, Claudia Fontes and Wura-Natasha Ogunji, 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo, Parque Ibirapuera, Av. Pedro Álvares Cabral – Vila Mariana, São Paulo, Duration 7/9-9/12/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed, Fri & Sun” 7:00-19:00, Thu, Sat: 7:00-22:00, www.bienal.org.br