Small ecology of the image" exhibition

The Pinacoteca de São Paulo, a museum of the Secretariat of Culture and Creative Economy of the State of São Paulo, celebrates the 35-year career of Rosângela Rennó (Belo Horizonte, 1962) with a panoramic exhibition that brings together around 130 works between 1987 and 2021. The exhibition Little ecology of the image presents the main arguments that the artist has developed around "expanded photography", that which goes beyond the creation of authorial images and includes their technical and social processes. In addition to works that punctuate this entire trajectory, the curatorship includes works that will be seen for the first time and a project commissioned by Pina.

The first work to be shown in Brazil is the installation Eaux des colonies (2021)Rennó's residency in Cologne, Germany, and the series Remarkable Beings of the World(2014-2021), produced in Las Palmas, Spain. Also part of the selection is the videoinstallationNo Man's Land (2021), a collection of video lectures distributed by the Catholic Church in 1980 on the struggle of ordinary citizens for political and civil rights, which was commissioned by the Pinacoteca de São Paulo for this exhibition. Also gaining emphasis are the works Fantastic Realism (1991); Red Series (Military) (2000-3) and Universal Archive (1992-).

Curated by Ana Maria Maia, the show adopts works of diverse languages, from photographs to collections, objects, installations and audiovisual works that will be distributed in three rooms on the fourth floor of the Pinacoteca Estação. Despite the variety of supports, there is a direction towards the way in which the artist observed and commented on a Brazilian historical imaginary and its persistence in the present. The exhibition organization abandons chronology for a presentation based on the subjects treated in a persistent and recurrent manner throughout her career.

"The artist considers photography a pretext to question the archives, the narratives and the power relations that make some images exist and circulate, while many others remain invisible and, therefore, forgotten. In this sense, although the photographic language is in fact predominant as a support and subject in her work, it appears in an expanded form, which involves assuming its backstage, making criticisms and deconstructions; interweaving it with texts, machines, objects and collections," summarizes the curator Ana Maria Maia.

In all, there will be three thematic nuclei. The first of these is dedicated to the privacy of subjects and the politics of memory. This space includes works from the beginning of Rosângela Rennó's career, when recourse to family archives, with an autobiographical tone, and a self-reference to photographic processes and materials predominated. The series Little Ecology of the Image, 1988, title work of the exhibitionis in this room and part of the albums of photographs taken by her father. Rennó manipulates the elements of the image, sometimes leaving them very dark, sometimes only the silhouettes, and makes visual and textual comments on the developed photos themselves. In the room, there are also later works, such as the series Body of the Soul (2003), made from newspaper photographs in which relatives of missing persons carry photographs to publicize their search. The artist reproduces these images and, based on them, reflects on the role of photography as an attestation of existence, much more than just memory.

In the next room, one finds an artistic production guided by the observation of public instances. How do the press, the state and the institutions of training and control contribute to individual and collective processes of subjectivation? In this axis, the visitor will have access to some works of the project Universal Archive (1992-)one of the artist's longest ongoing series, which consists of a collection of newspaper reports in which reference is made to a photograph that is absent. The stories, such as, for example, "theIndian woman, V., removed the grimy photo from her clothes", are diagrammed by Rennó and may be presented in simple outlines or even become part of an installation with its own light design, which is what happens in Hipocampo (1995-8), which is present in the show.

The last axis brings a constant analysis of the artist about the effects of coloniality in the maintenance of systems of control and violence, permeated by issues of class and especially race. In the room, will be exposed the unpublished project and still under construction Eaux des colonies (2020-), installation with perfume bottles that is the result of Rennó's artistic residency in Cologne, Germany, held in 2020.

For this most recent work, Rennó portrays the expansionist spirit of colonialism by approaching the history of cologne. With the growth of trade routes in Europe, the elixir went from being an object of desire, a symbol of a social stratum, to being a synonym for any type of perfume, including a practice of counterfeiting that reached various parts of the world. The research on the course of cologne throughout more than 300 years of history was started during the covid-19 pandemic, when several institutions expanded their digital collections, which facilitated the studies. The aim is to exemplify the efficiency of some colonisation models up to the present time by observing the "advantageous" relationship between colony and colonies.
Little ecology of the image is sponsored by Credit Suisse, Shopping Pátio Higienópolis and Engeform.

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Pequena ecologia da imagem
Panoramic exhibition by the artist Rosângela Rennó
Curator: Ana Maria Maia
Period: 02.10.2021 to 07.03.2022
Pinacoteca Estação
Address: 4th floor Largo General Osório, 66 - Santa Ifigênia Tickets Free of charge, with reservation at www.pinacoteca.org.br