The exhibition “Fullgás – artes visuais e anos 1980 no Brasil” will open on October 2, 2024 at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil Rio de Janeiro, as part of the celebrations for the 35th anniversary of the CCBB RJ. With Raphael Fonseca as chief curator and Amanda Tavares and Tálisson Melo as assistant curators, the unprecedented exhibition will present around 300 works by more than 200 artists from all regions of the country, showing a broad panorama of Brazilian arts in the 1980s. Elements of the visual culture of the time, such as magazines, pamphlets, record covers and iconic objects, will complete the exhibition, expanding the reflection on the period.

The exhibition Pleas of Resistance traverses more than twenty-five years of practice by the artist Carlos Motta (Bogota, 1978), who consistently engages with the body and sexual dissidence as a terrain of experimentation and political contestation. His early explorations of photographic self-portraiture are shown alongside his most recent performances and video installations. The exhibition explores the magnitude of Motta’s artistic research and its implacable rigor in relation to the archive, interrogating its violence, its silencing and its desires. Motta’s work challenges the imposition of Eurocentric epistemologies – from the time of the conquest and colonial period in the Americas to the present day – and considers the legacy of religion as a perpetrator and disturbing vehicle of coloniality.

Motta initiated his artistic trajectory at a young age, in the late 1990s, shortly before emigrating to New York and settling there. The exhibition pays close attention to the artist’s engagement with political histories and social movements – specifically the politics of sexuality and gender and the HIV/Aids epidemic – and their contemporary manifestations on the fragility of bodies. The notion of the collective body and the artist’s attention to the politics of care are central to both individual and self-representation, as well as to the various forms of collaboration that the artist has realised in his diverse projects over the years.

Motta’s works propose alternative accounts to the hegemonic narratives of history, religion and democracy. His work and artistic collaborations materialise the potential for social reform by rewriting the official histories of colonization, military dictatorships and neo-fascism – in a pilgrimage that is always blasphemous, corporeal and political.

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Pavão misterioso, pássaro formoso
Tudo é mistério nesse teu voar
Ai se eu corresse assim
Tantos céus assim
Muita história eu tinha pra contar
Pavão misterioso nessa cauda aberta em leque
Me guarda moleque de eterno brincar.
Ednardo

A obra de Cadu revela as inquietações que dividem os interesses do artista num processo que privilegia tanto o racional quanto o poético. Permitir que múltiplas vozes se manifestem, dialogando com diferentes formas e cores, linhas, desenhos, colagens e tintas, é produzir arte a partir de fragmentos e símbolos das mais diversas narrativas visuais. Camadas de imagens que se sobrepõem proporcionam uma quebra intencional, livre e transgressora, mas são também objeto de reflexão sobre as perspectivas do tempo, da história, da continuidade e permanência, da força da simbologia no cotidiano.
No acervo escultórico do Museu da República, Cadu encontrou imagens alegóricas, variadas e instigantes, representando pensamentos, ideias e conceitos sob forma figurada. As esculturas remetem à questão do poder político no Brasil, assim como exploram um tema mais universal, que são as relações de poder entre os gêneros. O dragão e a serpente, duas criaturas que personificam as forças do caos, derrotados, trazem o tema do homem capaz de subjugar a natureza e dominá-la, de acordo com sua vontade de animal superior.

E foi assim que começou uma conversa em que diferentes momentos históricos se conectam. O artista trouxe o pavão, que nas tradições esotéricas é um símbolo da totalidade, na medida em que reúne todas as cores no leque de sua cauda aberta. É também um emblema da beleza, assim como um signo da imortalidade. O poder e a vaidade, o pavão e o dragão e tantas outras imagens que surgem, inesperadas. A tinta a óleo que escorre em tons suaves ao lado de desenhos e colagens de pequenos monstros. O pavão e as velas de uma caravela, a cauda, os olhos, as esculturas. O olhar se perde na diversidade das imagens trazidas com delicadeza para o papel. Impossível perceber de imediato todas as sutilezas da obra de um artista que vive num estado de arte. Suas ideias se cruzam como as linhas que formam grades e quadriculados, espirais, retas e curvas ao fundo. Os vértices, as pontas agudas, geométricas sugerem a cama de pregos das faquirezas? Viu um gato, dois gatos? Pode ter certeza de que eles estão presentes entre as tintas e marmorizações. É preciso limpar a mente e os óculos, deixar que a imaginação corra solta e só assim, talvez, consigamos perceber tudo o que Cadu tem para nos contar.
– Isabel Portella

Sorry, this entry is only available in Português.

“(…)Certa vez, saindo de uma sessão de cinema de rua em São Paulo, Sylvia Caiuby Novaes viu Claudia Andujar, Lux Vidal e Maureen Bisilliat caminhando com os braços entrelaçados. A cumplicidade entre elas mostrava não somente um gesto de amizade, mas sugeria também outras afinidades entre essas mulheres. Aquela imagem na saída do cinema ficou impregnada na memória de Sylvia durante anos, até se transformar no desejo de investigar as trajetórias dessas três mulheres numa pesquisa de antropologia visual. Suas trajetórias são extraordinárias e muitas são as coincidências entre elas: as três possuem origem europeia, todas elas da mesma geração.(…)”

The centrality of black thought in the field of Brazilian visual arts, in different times and places. This is one of the main premises that guide the curatorial process of the exhibition Dos Brasis – Arte e Pensamento Negro, the most comprehensive exhibition dedicated exclusively to the production of black artists ever held in the country.

Tania Candiani opens her solo exhibition Contracultura today at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO).

Curated by Taiyana Pimentel Paradoa, the exhibition centers on the series Manifestan-tes, in which Candiani uses embroidery to depict women in protest, drawing inspira-tion from images of global intersectional feminist movements. The embroidered figu-res emerge as symbols of resistance, stripped of their original context, and reclaiming their presence in the public sphere.

“As with Goya’s Black Paintings, Candiani portrays violence against women, but at the same time, she imbues these bodies with power and visibility, transforming them into an act of political resistance,” writes Paradoa.

For Candiani, embroidery serves as a form of “drawing out loud,” highlighting the poli-tical gesture of women fighting for their rights and space in society.

The exhibition will be on display until April 6, 2025.

MASP concludes the year dedicated to LGBTQIA+ Diversity Stories by presenting, from December 13 to April 13, 2025, a group show that will occupy three exhibition spaces of the museum. The LGBTQIA+ Stories exhibition brings together more than 150 works of art and hundreds of national and international documents.

Curated by Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director, MASP; Julia Bryan-Wilson, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art, MASP; with the collaboration of André Mesquita, curator, MASP; and assistance from Leandro Muniz, assistant curator, MASP, and Teo Teotonio, curatorial assistant, MASP, the show is organized into eight sections: Love and desire; Icons and muses; Spaces and territories; Ecosexualities and transcendental fantasies; Sacred and profane; Abstractions; Archives; and Cuir Library.

Tania Candiani is at the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial 2024-2025 with Nomadic Stage.

The installation features an inflatable mobile stage that moves across the city, transforming urban centers into hubs for collective exchange, endowing these spaces with renewed significance. With its modular, lightweight structure and trumpet-like design, the stage invites community participation, creating lasting resonances. Using music as a connective tissue, the stage facilitates crossing cultural and social boundaries, creating new bonds among residents of different backgrounds. Rather than showcasing musical prowess, it aims to reactivate and reshape public space for the people of Abu Dhabi and Al Ain.

Commisioned by the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi for the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial 2024-2025.

Curated by Renato De Cara, curator of Paço das Artes, the exhibition features 58 works by 18 artists who, through their work, reflect on the significant and often irreversible impacts of human actions on the environment. In addition to changes in landscapes, the artists exhibit exercises in imagination for a fantastical future, investigating languages, utopian and apocalyptic representations and fictional objects.

“(…)The Sharjah Biennial 16 title, to carry, is a multivocal and open-ended proposition. The ever-expanding list of what to carry, and how to carry it, is an invitation to encounter the different formations and positions of the five curators as well as the constellation of resonances they have gathered.
The Biennial theme, to carry, entails understanding our precarity within spaces that are not our own while staying responsive to these sites through the cultures that we hold. It also signifies a bridge between multiple temporalities of embodied pasts and imagined futures, encompassing intergenerational stories and various modes of inheritance. What do we carry when it is time to travel, flee or move on? What are the passages that we form as we migrate between territories and across time? What do we carry when we remain? What do we carry when we survive?(…)”

Mirror of the Mind explores the entangled, inseparable relationship between the physical and emotional aspects of the body. This exhibition brings together more than 120 artists who use figuration and portraiture to examine the complexities of the human condition: the power of perception, the weight of trauma, the possibilities for healing, the space for introspection, the sense of belonging, and the impact on the flesh. Through various media—including photography, painting, sculpture, and video—the body is referenced as a vessel that experiences, documents, participates, and transforms throughout life’s journey. The duality of the body—its materiality and immateriality—becomes a visual landscape where dynamics of representation, from individual to collective, are addressed, illustrating the persistence of figuration in contemporary art.

Andrés Ramírez Gaviria opens today his first institutional solo exhibition in Mexico, at MUSAS – Museo de Arte de Sonora, in the city of Hermosillo. Dialéctica del Vacío: Forma y Percepción is curated by Octavio Avendaño Trujillo, director of MUSAS.

Covering works from 2010 to 2024, the exhibition explores the interaction between material and immaterial forms, reflecting on presence, absence, and the fluidity of time and space.

Gaviria’s practice investigates the fissures in systems of meaning: from science and technology to history, time, and mysticism. His works shed light on the poetic and enigmatic dimensions of these structures, reshaping cultural references through translations, associations, and reconfigurations. Often juxtaposing opposing ideas, Gaviria’s work challenges familiar paradigms, inspiring curiosity and introspection.

Iván Argote is the fourth artist to be commissioned for the High Line Plinth in New York City. In October, the artist will unveil Dinosaur (2024), a colossal, hyper-realistic sculpture of a pigeon cast in aluminum.

The sculpture humorously challenges the grandeur of traditional monuments that celebrate significant historical figures, choosing instead to canonize the city’s well-known street bird. Posed on a concrete plinth that resembles the sidewalks and buildings that New York City’s pigeons call home, Dinosaur inverts the power dynamics between bird and human, towering 21 feet above the Spur, over the countless pedestrians and motorists who pass by on 10th Avenue.

Iván Argote is the first artist from the global south and the youngest to receive a commission for the High Line.