Brasilidade Pós-Modernismo" exhibition

To celebrate the centenary of the 1922 Week of Modern Art and to shed light on the traces, remnants and achievements that the movement has brought to the Brazilian plastic arts over the last 100 years and to reflect, from today, on a process of reviewing and repairing this context. This is the aim of Brasilidade Post-ModernismThe exhibition will be presented between December 15th and March 7th, 2022 at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in São Paulo, sponsored by Banco do Brasil and carried out through the Federal Law for Cultural Incentive, of the Special Secretariat for Culture of the Ministry of Tourism and the Federal Government. In Rio de Janeiro, where it was shown at the CCBB RJ, the exhibition received over 25 thousand visitors.

 

Curated by Tereza de Arruda, the exhibition draws attention to the various characteristics of contemporary Brazilian art today whose existence is due, in part, to the legacy of the artistic cultural daring proposed by Modernism. Nuances that the public can check in the works of 51 artists from different generations that make up the body of the exhibition, including Adriana Varejão, Anna Bella Geiger, Arnaldo Antunes, Cildo Meireles, Daniel Lie, Ernesto Neto, Ge Viana, Jaider Esbell, Rosana Paulino and Tunga.

 

"This exhibition is not conceived with a historical look, but focused on the present time with works produced from the mid-1960s until today, some of them unpublished, that is, already with a historical distance from the beginnings of Brazilian modernity," explains Tereza de Arruda. "It is not an exhibition prepared as an end point, but as a starting point, as was the Week of Modern Art of 1922 for an innovative discussion to meet the demand of our time aware of the future path guided by creative protagonists," adds the curator.

 

Organized in six thematic nuclei: Freedom; Future; Identity; Nature; Aesthetics and Poetry, the show presents paintings, photographs, drawings, sculptures, installations and new media. According to Tereza de Arruda, through this plural set of works, "Brasilidade shows itself as diversified and mixed, regional and cosmopolitan, popular and erudite, folk and urban".

 

To bring the public even closer to the Week of 22, a series of free activities will be developed throughout the exhibition period in the Living Space of the CCBB Educativo - Art and Education Programme, conducted by educators from the art and technology centre JA.CA. There will also be a webapp with a comprehensive set of exhibition content, ensuring accessibility for all.

 

Opening the exhibition, the Liberdade (Freedom ) section reflects on the concerns and questions remaining from Brazilian colonialism from 1530 to 1822, in addition to its consequences and historical legacy. These are decisive factors in shaping the characteristics of the national socio-political and cultural context, which have become recurrent themes in a large part of Brazilian cultural production.

 

In 1922, the Modernists sought to break with Eurocentric standards in Brazilian culture and today, the contemporaries who make up this nucleus - Adriana Varejão, Anna Bella Geiger, José Rufino, Rosana Paulino, Farnese de Andrade, Tunga, Ge Viana and José De Quadros - seek to revise history as a starting point for a horizontal dialogue, emphasising diversity, visibility and inclusion.

 

The Brazilian Modernist vanguard group sought the new, the innovative, the unknown, of a constructive rather than destructive order. And one example of a future builder is Brasilia, the capital conceivedwith a utopian idea and considered one of the greatest achievements of Modernism in Brazil. "Its conception, idealisation and realisation are one of the greatest proofs of the realisation of a futurist idea", comments Tereza de Arruda.

 

Focusing on Brasília as an example of futuristic utopia, this section brings together engravings and drawings by architects Lina Bo Bardi, Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, work by artist Márcia Xavier, and records captured by photographer Joaquim Paiva and filmmaker Jorge Bodanzky.

 

The search for a profile, an identity, permeates the history of the Brazilian nation. It is from this search that the group exhibited in the Identity cluster is formed. The works by Alex Flemming, Berna Reale, Camila Soato, Daniel Lie, Fábio Baroli, Flávio Cerqueira, Glauco Rodrigues and Maxwell Alexandre present a Brazilianness with various facets of the Brazilian population.

 

"We speak here of 'deep Brazil', emphasised already in emblematic, pre-modernist literary works such as the book Os sertões (The Backlands) by Euclides da Cunha (1866-1909), published in 1902. Already in this period, Brazil was divided into two parts which prevail to this day: the Rio-São Paulo axis, of the elites, consequence of a promising economy resulting from financial and intellectual development, and consequently the cradle of the Week of Modern Art which took place 20 years after this publication, and the back-country, unknown, afflicted by precariousness and contempt for its potential", reflects Tereza de Arruda.

 

The Brazilian territory is demarcated by its vastness, plurality of biomes and global importance. In this section, the works of the artists Armarinhos Teixeira, Caetano Dias, Gisele Camargo, Luzia Simons, Marlene Almeida, Paulo Nazareth, Rosilene Luduvico and Rodrigo Braga guide questions of praise, sustainability and warning regarding nature and the relationship of the human being as a body immersed in the legacy of "terra brasilis".

 

Bringing together works by Barrão, Beatriz Milhazes, Cildo Meireles, Daiara Tukano, Delson Uchôa, Emmanuel Nassar, Ernesto Neto, Francisco de Almeida, Jaider Esbell, Judith Lauand, Luiz Hermano, Mira Schendel and Nelson Leirner, this nucleus arose from reflection on movements such as the anthropophagic, a fundamental action for understanding the essence of Brasilidade and a milestone in the history of Brazilian art. It was through it that the Brazilian national cultural identity was reviewed and came to be recognised.

 

And, according to the curator, this happened in 1928 with the publication of the Manifesto Antropófago published by Oswald de Andrade in the Revista de Antropofagia of São Paulo. In the text, the poet made a direct association with the word "anthropophagy", in reference to the rituals of cannibalism in which the belief was preached that after swallowing the flesh of a person, the cannibal would be granted all the power, knowledge and skills of the person devoured. "Oswald de Andrade's idea was to feed on the techniques and influences of other countries - in this case, mainly colonising Europe - and, from there, to foster the development of a new Brazilian artistic aesthetic. Nowadays, as we see here, it is not in the shadow of a European heritage and manifestations, but autonomous and authentic mixed with elements that make up Brasilidade dominated by colours, rhythms, shapes and the assimilation of the disparate universe of languages and means that guide it", comments Tereza de Arruda.

 

The Semana de Arte Moderna and the Modernist movement itself pleaded for the linguistic independence of Brazilian Portuguese from Portuguese of Portugal. The modernists believed that Brazilian Portuguese should be cultivated and propagated as the national language.

In this nucleus, works of concrete poetry, visual poetry and the appropriation of written art are exhibited - writing as independent art, writing as an autonomous visual element, writing as sound abstraction - by the artists André Azevedo, Arnaldo Antunes, Augusto de Campos, Floriano Romano, Júlio Plaza, Lenora de Barros, Rejane Cantoni and Shirley Paes Leme.

 

 

Tereza de Arruda is Master in Art History, graduated by the Free University of Berlin. Since 1989 she lives between São Paulo and Berlin. In 2021 she received a scholarship from the Anna Polke Foundation in Cologne to research the work of Sigmar Polke. As a curator, she collaborates internationally with various institutions and museums in the realization of group or monographic exhibitions, among others, in 2021, Art Sense Over Walls Away, Reinbeckhallen Foundation Berlin; Sergei Tchoban Futuristic Utopia or Reality, Kunsthalle Rostock; in 2019/2021, Chiharu Shiota Lifelines, CCBB RJ-DF-SP; Chiharu Shiota Internal Lines, Japan House; in 2018/2019, 50 years of realism - from photorealism to virtual reality, CCBB RJ-DF-SP; in 2018, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov Two Times, Kunsthalle Rostock; in 2017, Chiharu Shiota Under The Skin, Kunsthalle Rostock; Sigmar Polke Die Editionen, me collectors Room Berlin; Contraponto Acervo Sergio Carvalho, Museu da República DF; in 2015, InterAktion-Brasilien, Castelo Sacrow/Potsdam; Bill Viola at the Curitiba Biennial; Chiharu Shiota in search of destiny, SESC Pinheiros; in 2014, A arte que permanece, Acervo Chagas Freitas, Museu dos Correios DF-RJ; China Arte Brasil, OCA; in 2011, Sigmar Polke capitalist realism and other illustrated stories, MASP; India side by side, CCBB RJ-DF-SP and SESC; in 2010, Se não neste tempo, German contemporary painting 1989-2010, MASP. Since 2016 she is associate curator of the Kunsthalle Rostock. Guest curator and advisor of the Havana Biennale since 1997 and co-curator of the Curitiba International Biennale since 2009. (www.p-arte.com)

 

 

Exhibition Period: 15 December 2021 to 7 March 2022

Tickets: Booking via the app or Eventim website

Indicative Rating: Free

Address: Rua Álvares Penteado, 112 - Centro Histórico, Triângulo SP, São Paulo-SP

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