Anna Maria Maiolino - psssiiiuuu...

An anthological exhibition brings together the life and work of one of the most relevant contemporary artists

Anna Maria Maiolino's new exhibition - to be inaugurated in the month in which the artist turns 80 years old - will occupy, with around 300 artworks, all three large rooms on the upper floor of Instituto Tomie Ohtake, a space only before dedicated to Yayoi Kusama and Louise Bourgeois' solo shows. The curator Paulo Miyada spent the last three years together with Maiolino to design the exhibition, built from many hours of conversation that resulted, besides an in-depth essay by the curator on the artist's production, in models that meticulously arrange each selected work.

The anthological exhibition, once it brings significant moments, artworks and events in Maiolino's "life-work", as she herself named it, brings paintings, drawings, woodcuts, sculptures, photographs, films, videos, audio pieces and installations. According to Miyada, Anna Maria Maiolino - psssiiiuuu... (onomatopoeia that can be whistle, call, flirt, request for silence, secret, signal) was conceived as a spiral that circulates among all the phases and supports of the artist's career. The analogy with the spiral refers to the way of going back and forth instead of following a linear chronology. "One goes forward to find the beginning again, one consumes energy to return things to what they always were," the curator highlights.

Anna Maria Maiolino - psssiiiuuu... is divided into three nuclei that occupy respectively each of the three rooms of Instituto Tomie Ohtake. In ANNA, life, biography, desire and multiplicity converge in the body of the artist's work. The set brings together gestures of a woman who can be one or many, who desires and is desired, who cares, who disappears and abruptly emerges again. Overlapping multiple roles - as daughter, artist, mother, citizen, woman, lover, writer, Latin-American, European and immigrant - Maiolino mapped her physical and psychic dislocations during her life and built an understanding of identity as a constant flow that comes and goes between one and the other, between the self and the crowd.

In No No No, the artworks confront totalitarianism, censorship, repression and inequality. Their political interest ranges from the violence of dictatorial regimes in Latin America to the apparent normalisation of poverty and hunger on a global scale. The central focuses of this core are the re-make of the celebrated work Rice and Beans (1979), which will include offering meals to the public in some activations; a new installation called Love becomes revolutionary, based on a 1992 project that paid tribute to the brave women who organised to pursue truth and justice after losing their children during the Argentine military dictatorship; and artworks that refer to the exhibition Aos Poucos, which Maiolino held in 1978 and Miyada identifies as an important political exhibition held in Brazil and until today little discussed by the critics.

In turn, Ações Matéricas starts from the encounter between diverse materialities and atavistic gestures identified both to daily work and the birth of humanity. Pressing, shaping, cutting, grasping, draining and rolling are some of the basic actions Maiolino employs while dealing with clay, paint, glass, concrete and other materials, resulting in a visual and sculptural practice strongly anchored in the scale of the body. The section includes artworks made over 50 years ago alongside recent artworks, composing a kind of landscape with multiple pieces that relate to each other in a tactile and visual way. In this nucleus one can apprehend the great spiral path created by the exhibition: to go back and forth in time, language and subjectivity.

The exhibition catalogue features an extensive essay by Paulo Miyada, reproductions of all the artworks and also an unprecedented selection of the artist's writings alongside documents, projects, photographs and sketches. These documents reinforce the prerogative of gender, maternity, sexuality, migratory politics and socio-political issues as key aspects of a work that is completely mixed with life, even when its appearance is not obviously autobiographical, nor predominantly narrative. Complementary to the exhibition, this publication will offer a unique opportunity to consider the implications between Anna Maria Maiolino's life and work.