Galeria Leme

Curated by Paulo Miyada e Priscyla Gomes, the show in Instituto Tomie Ohtake, in São Paulo, brings together for the first time coloured portraits by made by Luiz Braga in the las four decades. Opening at August 13, the show takes place until december 12.

Born in Belém, Pará, Luiz Braga is known as the chronicler of colors and everyday signs of Pará. Diving the peripheral reality of Pará, the artist uniquely records the Amazonian atmosphere and a daily life often forgotten by the local middle class. The artist’s involvement with the population over the years has created a complicity that makes his portraits possible. Photography, wrote Luiz Braga, is a mask, mirror and shield. It is a mediation, a contact zone in which the registrant and his subject establish a complex dialogue.

Acess Instituto Tomie Ohtake’s website to learn more

There is an insistent question hammering the minds of artists, producers and thinkers of culture in Brazil: how to react to the barbarities of the present? From the government’s denialism of the pandemic to outright lies about the country’s environmental policy; from the condescension of racist, transphobic, homophobic and misogynist postures to the attempt to flexibilize the gun possession – How long are we going to tolerate people being killed, by covid-19, by violence against minorities, by environmental policies that destroy, with a single stroke , an entire community, or even because of “food insecurity” (the new name for hunger, an old familiar in Brazil)?

​Is it possible, at this moment, to articulate a critical answer from the sphere of culture? Putting art back into the public debate so that it might be able to make, through its acute questioning, the images it creates, the affections it mobilizes, a broad and forceful critique of the situation in which we find ourselves? How to keep producing, publicly exhibiting and funding current projects? How to think about all of this when, often, survival itself is at risk? How to work in a time of social isolation, in the middle of dismantling the precarious ways of financing artistic actions, at a time when the government labels artists as “vagabonds”? Wouldn’t it be necessary to stop everything, to refuse to continue, to do anything, in a kind of radical refusal of everything that this instituted power represents?

These are the questions this project looks for: Can art “Dizer Não” [Say No]? What is feasible to put in motion today? And how to do it? Is it possible for us to reflect together on what artists and other cultural agents should – in an ethical sense – do or not do? What is up to us in this situation? What are the limits of our actions?

It is in this constant oscillation, between doing and not doing, that this project took shape. It is between the will to fight and the mourning that is imposed on us daily, between the bet on the importance of symbolic, language and thought experiments and the confrontation with death, with the insignificance of life, that we move forward and backward. It is necessary to continue. I cannot continue. It is necessary to continue. So I will continue. Even so, echoing Beckett’s final lines in L’Innommable, we go back and forth in wavering, ambiguous, stunned motions.

Against the speech that hastily decreed the obsolescence of physical shows, we decided to try once again. Insisting on the object presence, on the possibility of bodily enjoyment, on contact with matter. Even in a period when encounters between people have to be strictly regulated. As organizers, we propose to build, with the help of each artist who takes part in the project, two complementary platforms: a shed space in Barra Funda and a website. Those who are not inclined to participate in one of them can contribute to the other. Declines from our invitation may also be shared publicly on the site, as forms of “Dizer Não” [Saying No].

In addition to this text, which presents the principles of the project, we would like to indicate a group of works – some of which are well known – that were present in the construction process of this proposal. They were used as a conceptual basis and form a kind of nucleus, reminding us that aspects of what we are looking for have already appeared in the work of other artists. Cildo Meireles, Fiat Lux: o Sermão da Montanha; Francis Alÿs, Paradox of Praxis 1: Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing; Jota Mombaça, Veio o Tempo em que por Todos os Lados as Luzes Dessa Época Foram Acendidas; Juçara Marçal, Encarnado and Regina José Galindo, Monumento a las Desaparecidas.

This is not an invitation to participate in a show, but a proposal to be together. To the extent of our own limitations and the limitations of the time we live. Through this project we try to make public what is being thought and produced in this dark ages, betting we can construct a huge “No” together. 

ORGANIZERS

Adriana Rodrigues, Edu Marin, Érica Burini and Thaís Rivitti

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ARTISTS

Adriano Machado, Ana Dias Batista, André Komatsu, Bertô, Bruna Kury e Gil Porto Pyrata, Cildo Meireles, Clara Ianni, Craca e Raphael Franco, Cuca Ferreira, Daniel Jablonski, Denise Alves-Rodrigues and Pablo Vieira, Edu Marin, Elizabeth Slamek, Fernando Burjato, Flora Leite, Frederico Filippi e C. L. Salvaro, Graziela Kunsch, Isael Maxakali, JAMAC, João Loureiro, Juçara Marçal, Kadija de Paula & Chico Togni, Kauê Garcia, Laura Andreato e MuitasKoisas, Leda Catunda, Lia Chaia, Lícida Vidal, Lucimélia Romão, Marcelo Amorim, MUSEUL*RA, Paola Ribeiro, Rafael Amorim, Raphael Escobar, Regina José Galindo, Rochelle Costi, Shima, Sol Casal, Vânia Medeiros, Wagner Pinto

DESIGNERS

Elizabeth Slamek, Lia Assumpção, Roberta Cardoso

WHEN

De 22 de Julho a 19 de Setembro de 2021

WHERE

Rua Cruzeiro, 802 – Barra Funda. São Paulo – SP

SUPPORTED BY

Ateliê 397

Support the show

Release:

The expression Zona da Mata corresponds geographically to the coastal strip of northeastern Brazil, parallel to the Atlantic Ocean and extending from Rio Grande do Norte to Bahia. Stretches of the original Atlantic Forest, now almost extinct in the region, were fertile soil exploited in a predatory way. Gateway to colonization, it is historically a territory of conflict, established in the mode of invasion and occupation, matrix of removal of the original peoples and the African diaspora in the country.

This exhibition adopts the term Zona da Mata as a symbolic metaphor, not only in the sense of physical geography, in the necessary confrontation of the challenge of dealing with the violent constitution of our territory. Given the predatory exploitation of people and places, how to restore dignity to what we need to recognize as our place of residency? It is unavoidable to renegotiate our human condition in the inseparable relationship between culture and nature.

Faced with a Brazil that is under feverish, violent and retrograde convulsion, Zona da Mata is now the whole country. In line with the global challenge, now, more than ever, we must reposition ourselves in the face of our pact as a country and society, starting from the recognition of ancestral knowledge that we did not know how to cherish, without imprisoning them in a historical past, but as a fundamental part of our desirable present.

The exhibition is organized in four parts in different spaces and with different temporalities. Therefore, we are never faced with the totality of the exhibition, but only its fragments. It is held in MAC USP (5th floor b-wing and ground floor) throughout its whole length and in MAM (in the glass room in two moments). The exhibition enjoys the necessary condition of crossing, a faster path on foot than motorized, to articulate the two neighboring areas, disconnected a posteriori with Ibirapuera transformation project in 1954, where originally was a flooded forest – “forest that was once a forest” in Tupi Guarani. The project attempts a coming-and-going that adheres to the city floor, addressed to the present and to the future, in the inseparable pact of a shared and simultaneously diverted landscape, from the vibrant uniqueness of each work here on show and from the collection of both institutions that integrate this landscape-exhibition.

Curators:

Ana Magalhães
Cauê Alves
Marta Bogéa