10th Bienal do Mercosul: Messages From a New America

Rua General Bento Martins, 24 / cj 1201 Centro Histórico / Porto Alegre / RS / Brasil / 90.010-080 CNPJ: 01.546.913/0001-70 Fone/fax: +55 (51) 3254-7500 imprensa@bienalmercosul.art.br www.fundacaobienal.art.br

10th Bienal do Mercosul Messages From a New America October 23 – December 6 Under the title Messages From a New America, the 10th Bienal do Mercosul resumes its historic vocation by prioritizing, again, the art produced in Latin American countries. The exhibition, which will take place from October 23 to December 6 2015, in Porto Alegre, will has as a chief curator Gaudêncio Fidelis (Brazil). The curatorial team is composed by Márcio Tavares (Brazil) as adjunct curator, Ana Zavadil (Brazil) as assistant curator, and Cristián G. Gallegos (Chile) as Dialogante – education curator.

The curatorial platform for the 10th Bienal do Mercosul will focus on the exhibition of the artistic production of Latin American countries, resuming the initial vocation signaled on its first edition, in which the curatorial strategy consisted in “rewriting” the history of Latin American art. This edition of the exhibition will seek to promote the visibility, legibility and reception of the artistic production of those countries through a large-scale exhibition which will be built around the most relevant production from the region. The exhibition intends to give an account of a considerable number of “blind spots” left behind by criticism and historiography by bringing to the surface works whose artistic contribution has yet to receive its deserved critical consideration.

The 10th Bienal do Mercosul will be composed by four great conceptual fields: The Journey of Adversity [A Jornada da Adversidade], The Insurgence of the Senses [A Insurgência dos Sentidos], The Undeleting of the Tropics [O Desapagamento dos Trópicos] and The Journey Continues [A Jornada Continua]. Each of them will be composed by exhibitions, besides activities focused on the professional training on the curatorial field and the development of a related educational program.

The 10th edition of the exhibition will be held considering the art’s historical substrate and pointing towards a dimension of cultural and artistic excellence and the significance of contemporary production. To do so, it will present a vast number of canonical and non-canonical works, totaling a wide historical arch up to the current production.

The exhibition will resort to a bold curatorial project, which will depart from conceptual benchmarks, whose contribution has been relevant to the region such as Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagy, the neobaroque as a miscegenation strategy, the investigation upon other senses apart from sight, and the new movements of artistic form through several “modernisms” from Latin American countries. The curatorial platform of the 10th Bienal do Mercosul intends to contribute to a history of exhibitions about the art of Latin American as well, intervening in a considerable manner to the presentation of new curatorial models for the promotion of artistic production and its historical legibility.

CONCEPTUAL FIELDS I – The Journey of Adversity The first structural part of the 10th Bienal do Mercosul project has origins in the emblematic quote

by Hélio Oiticica, “From Adversity We Thrive!” published in the catalogue for the New Brazilian Objectivity exhibition held at Rio de Janeiro’s Museum of Modern Art, in 1967. Aware of the

Rua General Bento Martins, 24 / cj 1201 Centro Histórico / Porto Alegre / RS / Brasil / 90.010-080 CNPJ: 01.546.913/0001-70 Fone/fax: +55 (51) 3254-7500 imprensa@bienalmercosul.art.br www.fundacaobienal.art.br

difficulty in building reasonable conditions for the art flow on the public field, considering several moments of political instability whereby the Latin American countries went through, The Journey of Adversity will be composed by four vectors to be taken as a theoretical and conceptual reference: Precariousness, Difficulty, Resistance and Creative Generosity.

For the artists of many Latin American countries it isn’t possible to ignore the huge obstacles to be transposed so that art can be produced and move around, such as the resistance to the political and economic storms to which their countries are historically submitted or the critical institutional insolvency from which they eventually suffer. Aware of those difficulties, the exhibition’s production will be carried out conscious of an “adversity policy”. Although being said by a Brazilian artist, this policy symbolizes well the huge difficulties faced by the arts in the whole region, often on the sidelines of the great international centers of artistic production and distribution, in other words, the economic and political centers of the world. This segment of the exhibition has as its political inclination to develop the principles of a “memory pedagogy”, which will sustain the Education Program, to be able to keep in constant flux the huge creative fortune of the arts in Latin American countries, considering this geographical area and its artistic production as the absolute priority of the exhibition.

To the work to be developed at the 10th Bienal do Mercosul, the Pedagogy of Memory is addressed as a concept with is sustained on the validation of experience as a resource for the materialization of historicity through which it constitutes infinite interpretations. Thereby, the process of understanding artistic production acquires a pedagogical content of reflection, transformative and producer of new senses. Therefore, from it rises the idea that the artistic production poses an experience of otherness in which the works are not treated as mere objects, but as “conceptual operations”, which instigate relations between the whole and its parts, between visibility and signification power, as well as the affective sensibilities which they can devise between the works’ creation space and the horizon of expectation generated by its visibility. Thus, the pedagogical phenomenon offers itself as a process of open and contingent dialogue which imposes a multidisciplinary relationship which travels by the aesthetic, political and cultural spheres of the past, whilst being fed back by the present.

EXHIBITIONS The Biography of Urban Life: the idea of Biography of Urban Life is to provide an artistic experience around the fractured process of urbanization in Latin America, taking the city of Porto Alegre as a reference and starting point. This exhibition intends to address relations between communication fluxes as a creative platform of reflection upon the urban space. Thereby, it will use a wide array of art works to build a contemporary narrative about the experience of cohabiting in Latin American cities. Biography of Urban Life is an exhibition which begins within the exhibition space and develops in the city through several devices which will allow the detailing of a group of experiences on urbanity in Latin American countries which are still not sufficiently explored.

Modernism in Parallax: an exhibition which will rewrite the constitution of modernity specifically on Latin American countries – or of their diverse modernities – which present themselves, in many cases, occulted by critic and historiography. The exhibition presents a revisionist view of modernity on these countries which transforms in a confluence of works, theory and artistic manifestos which constitute a redefinition of the modern project on the shores.

Rua General Bento Martins, 24 / cj 1201 Centro Histórico / Porto Alegre / RS / Brasil / 90.010-080 CNPJ: 01.546.913/0001-70 Fone/fax: +55 (51) 3254-7500 imprensa@bienalmercosul.art.br www.fundacaobienal.art.br

II – The Insurgence of the Senses The Insurgence of the Senses will deal with what can be considered as the emergency of a “peripheral sensibility”, which indicates not only an inclination of the transformation of the artistic canon differentiated from the one located next to the great centers of international artistic production, as it determines a new geography of the margins. But, it equally indicates a great disposition to explore the senses which we might consider inferior in relation to the one held as hegemonic in the field of art, in other words, sight. Therefore, senses such as smell, touch, taste and hearing will also have a meaningful part in the 10th Biennial. This exhibition segment aims to expand several ways which allow other forms of encounter between visitor and artwork. The contact with artistic works through the exploration of other senses beyond vision allows the exhibition to introduce non-traditional interpretative fields of expansion, focused on a multilateral relation of perception between audience and the work of art.

EXHIBITIONS Neobaroque Anthropophagy: The Latin American contemporary baroque, or neobaroque, became, first of all, an instrument of resistance and post-colonial self-definition throughout the 1970s, reclaiming the historical roots of the Baroque to transform into an instrument of cultural emancipation. This exhibition is structured through the concept of Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagy in conjunction with the neobaroque. Through this exhibition, the 10th Bienal do Mercosul will seek to explore how the strategies which date back to how the indigenous forms of character confronted and changed the European systems of cultural colonization in a kind of cultural anthropophagy that appears as current even today.

Olfactory: Smell in Art: This exhibition introduces aspects of modern and contemporary production in Latin America which challenge the established prerrogatives of canonicity, specially those built around the Wstern Canon, by privileging anti-ocular manifestations through the developments of a number of issues related to olfaction. This exhibition analyzes classificatory hierarchies of smell in the universe of art as a possibility for new interpretative strategies.

Participant artists: · Alexandre Vogler (Rio de Janeiro-Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 1973) · Amélia Toledo (São Paulo-São Paulo, Brasil, 1926) · Angélica Pérez Germain (Califórnia-Estados Unidos, 1972 - Islas Juan Fernández-Chile, 2010) · Antonieta Santos Feio (Belém-Pará, Brasil, 1897 - Santos-São Paulo, Brasil, 1980) · Antonio Manuel (Avelãs de Caminho-Portugal, 1947) · Britto Velho (Porto Alegre-Rio Grande do Sul, Brasil, 1946) · Daniel Lezama (Cidade do México-México, 1968) · Ding Musa (São Paulo-São Paulo, Brasil, 1979) · Dudi Maia Rosa (São Paulo-São Paulo, Brasil, 1946) · Ernesto Neto (Rio de Janeiro-Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 1964) · Estevão da Silva (Rio de Janeiro-Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 1844 -1891) · Flávio Cerqueira (São Paulo-São Paulo, Brasil, 1983) · Fritzia Irízar (Culiacán-México, 1977) · Hélio Oiticica (Rio de Janeiro-Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 1937 - 1980)

Rua General Bento Martins, 24 / cj 1201 Centro Histórico / Porto Alegre / RS / Brasil / 90.010-080 CNPJ: 01.546.913/0001-70 Fone/fax: +55 (51) 3254-7500 imprensa@bienalmercosul.art.br www.fundacaobienal.art.br

· José Ronaldo Lima (Rio Casca-Minas Gerais, Brasil, 1939) · Juraci Dórea (Feira de Santana-Bahia, Brasil, 1944) · Lygia Pape (Nova Friburgo-Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 1927 - Rio de Janeiro-Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 2004) · Marcelo Silveira (Gravatá-Pernambuco, Brasil, 1962) · Melissa Barbery (Belém-Pará, Brasil, 1977) · Oswaldo Maciá (Cartagena-Colômbia, 1960) · Pablo Lobato (Bom Despacho-Minas Gerais, Brasil, 1976) · Patricia Wich (Asunción-Paraguay, 1978) · Paulo Bruscky (Recife-Pernambuco, Brasil, 1949) · Rubén Ortiz-Torres (Cidade do México-México, 1964) · Rubens Gerchman (Rio de Janeiro-Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 1942 - São Paulo-São Paulo, Brasil, 2008) · Saidel Brito Lorenzo (Matanzas-Cuba, 1973) · Sandra Cinto (Santo André-São Paulo, Brasil, 1968) · Shirley Paes Leme (Cachoeira Dourada-Goiás, Brasil, 1955) · Waltércio Caldas (Rio de Janeiro-Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 1946) Body Apparatuses: Within art’s history, clothes, accessories and other devices have been explored in the representation of paintings, objects and through the story of fashion itself. The dress code reflects the power status, magic attributions, religious rituals, cultural codes and social barriers, among other countless attributes. Dress codes and their apparatuses are instrumental to discuss questions of art history such as cultural derivation, hybridity, transnational influences, postcolonialism and exoticism which surpass the constitution of art throughout time.

III – The Undeleting of the Tropics The museums and the academy are institutional instances determining in the constitution of art’s history. We can regard them as the main responsible to establish what will gain visibility or will remain in the obscurity of their technical resources, or even what will not even get to enter in its interior, or still ascend to the plateau of hegemonic narratives. At the same time, those instances are responsible to ensure artistic heritage for future generations and constitute platforms of extreme importance to define a field of legibility for art and its history. However, the history of art is constituted by countless blind spots and a considerable trajectory of exclusions. The importance of large scale exhibitions such as biennials also consists in the possibility of creating a collection of works that, together present themselves as determinant to form a history of art, which often can be considered parallel to the official history of art established by the academy or museological institutions.

EXHIBITIONS Dust and the World of Objects: Dust is formed by countless particles of the most varied sources and specificities, representing, therefore, diversity, as it doesn’t promote discrimination between its fragments. This exhibition will present a brief trajectory of dust in works of art throughout the history of art and its presence in artistic procedures. Just as all the exhibitions on the 10th Bienal do Mercosul project, Dust and the World of Objects presents aspects of a memory pedagogy, which will be further explored on the Educational Project.

Rua General Bento Martins, 24 / cj 1201 Centro Histórico / Porto Alegre / RS / Brasil / 90.010-080 CNPJ: 01.546.913/0001-70 Fone/fax: +55 (51) 3254-7500 imprensa@bienalmercosul.art.br www.fundacaobienal.art.br

Marginália of Form: the exhibition aims to signal a wide collection of art works which, although many of them are known, are kept on the sidelines of the interest of critic and historiography and were not included in a narrative of the history of art in Latin America in the way they deserved to be. The exhibition presents a group of works whose proposal is to change the perception that the history of art in Latin America is still constituted of a small group of works worthy of being critical and historiographical interest within the geographical dimension of those countries, and presented in international exhibitions about the region.

V – The Journey Continues The fourth and last segment of the 10th Bienal do Mercosul promotes the educational training on the curatorial universe as a strategy of maintenance and consolidation of a continuous process of legibility of artistic production in Latin America.

Experimental School of Curating This edition of the contemporary art exhibition will establish a program for young curators who live in different Latin American countries. Classes will be given by the 10th Bienal do Mercosul curators and guests during a period of three months. Through the Experimental School of Curatorship the Bienal do Mercosul Foundation will, for the first time, incorporate the Educational Program within the exhibition through a strategy professional training. The objective is to prepare young curators who will be part of a new generation of curatorial professionals in Latin American countries.

The 10 Messages A project composed by 10 lectures about art, curatorship, culture, art education, history of exhibitions, art critic, institutional policy, biennials, taught by professionals of the field, coming from several countries. This segment of the project aims towards a larger audience, since the lectures will be open to the general public.

Editorial Project The 10th Bienal do Mercosul will be accompanied by a publishing project composed by a number of publications. One will be a kind of diary of the trajectory of the Biennial. Another publication will be dedicated to the 10th edition project itself, its conceptual platform and auxiliary theoretical texts which will be published in the form of a work manual. A volume will be published in the format of a guide to the exhibition and another in a large format catalogue will be dedicated to the exhibition as a whole.