The modern era arose in the shadow of the ideals won by the French Revolution. The growth of the liberal democracies and republics around the world, the development of the modern ideologies, the sciences and the arts, the invention of total war, and, most significantly, man as a central character in this scene, were born during the revolution.

In the field of art, many artists nowadays are dedicated to researching about the unfoldings of modernism. There are those who prefer to investigate the 16th-century philosophical, ethical, aesthetic and political roots that led to the rise of the modern era and the full establishment and expansion of the liberal ideals in all the spheres of Western culture until today. This investigatory procedure is evident in the exhibition U=RI proposed by the young artists Guilherme Peters and Henrique Cesar.

The exhibition’s title refers to the formula used in physics for the measurement of electrical tension (voltage) between two points, and, in the case of this exhibition, reveals a number of the procedures exercised by the artists in conceiving, elaborating and materializing their works. This takes place in the way that the three artists have chosen to represent the human body.

In the case of the series of self-portraits “Enxertos” [Grafts] “Antenas” [Antennas] and Terra [Earth], by Henrique Cesar, man, his physical needs, curiosities, originality and dominion over the forces of nature is the center of the exhibition, and, therefore, of the world, appearing turbocharged by technical artificialities suggested by antennas, in a mix between man and machine.

In the case of Guilherme Peters, repetition works as a tool to evidence man’s eternal search for overcoming the physical and intellectual limits of the body. In the performance “Estudante” [2012], which Peters will stage during the show, the repetition ad infinitum of a single movement refers, according to the artist himself, to the idea of the eminent failure of the entire process of knowledge. In the performance, the artist repeatedly tries to finish an observational drawing which, however, depends on physical action to suspend books related to the history of art by means of a system of pulleys and cables connected like processes to his body.

In 2010, Guilherme Peters embodied one of the main characters of modern history in the video “Robespierre e a tentativa de retomar a revolução” [Robespierre and the Attempt to Resume the Revolution]. In the installation, the artist weaves a commentary about the origin of the Republican movement, which points to the impossibility of the revolutionary utopia to prosper in a world in which simple and repetitive tasks provoke “vertigo.”

In U=RI, the artist continues this research by presenting a set of works directly related to this theme, such as the installation “Retrato de Robespierre”, in which an image of the French revolutionary is printed by way of a continuous process of oxidation, which will transform the image.

A similar chemical process is used by Peters in the installations “Autodestruição dos direitos humanos” [Self-Destruction of the Human Rights], “Terra Santa” [Holy Land] and “Máquina para evocar o espírito de Joseph Beuys através de sua imagem” [Machine to Evoke the Spirit of Joseph Beuys by Means of His Image]. In the first two works, the process of the oxidation of iron plates is constant and will lead to the complete transformation of the image of the 18th-century “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,” and, in the second, of a passage excerpted from the Torah which refers to the Promised Land, or present-day Palestine. For its part, in “Máquina para evocar o espírito de Joseph Beuys através de sua imagem”, which makes reference to the performance created by Peters in 2009, Beuys’s portrait and one of the artist himself were embossed side-by-side on a copper plate (Beuys), and an iron plate (Peters). Submersed in an aquarium, the plates will undergo a process of electrolysis, which will make the portrait of Peters, on the iron plate, incorporate particles of copper given off by the Beuys plate.

The obscurantism that the modern era tried to combat by way of scientific knowledge appears in the series “Catacumbas” [Catacombs] by Henrique Cesar. In the drawings, the artist presents images of underground catacombs located in the cities of São Paulo and Paris, alongside the video “Endoscopia” [Endoscopy], in which an endoscopic camera scrutinizes the interior of a skeleton, as well as the polyptych “Radiografia de Parede” [Wall X-Ray]. In the latter, Cesar presents what lies under the cement coating on walls, revealing his scientific interests concerning that which is beneath the sidewalk, beneath the skin or even beneath the façade of walls.

A similar procedure of scrutiny appears in the video “Tentativa de aspirar o grande labirinto” [Attempt to Aspirate the Great Labyrinth], in which Peters used 3-D editing tools to create a virtual stroll within one of Helio Oiticica’s “Metasquemas”. In the work, Peters also appropriates the text “Brasil Diarréia,” written by Oiticica in 1970, which points to the dilution of the Brazilian constructive elements.

To works such as “Catacumbas”, “Endoscopia” and “Políptico Radiografia de Parede”, Cesar counterposes his “Tratado Anagógico” [Anagogic Treatise]. The 1.8-meter-high drawing, similar to a giant chemical formula, uses technical tools with a very clear and specific role in the field of science to verify mystical and obscurantist meanings.

If on the one hand Cesar chooses the term “treaty” to criticize the countercurrent that insists on questioning scientific knowledge, Peter prefers the format of diagrams, schemes, graphics and circuits, which, in the history of knowledge, helped man to organize knowledge and assured the basis for the future comprehension of his acquisitions, to approach subjective questions. This is what occurs in “Projeto para um grande resistor” [Project for a Large Resistor] and “Projeto para grande carburador” [Project for a Large Carburetor]. In the first, Peters used pages from Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book as the backdrop for a large drawing that imitates an electrical circuit, and, in the second, the drawing for the design of a large carburetor is overlaid on notes about the French Revolution.

Although he belongs to the same generation as Cesar, Peters, and Salem, Nicolas Bacal (28) was born, lives and works in Buenos Aires. Arquitetura da solidão [Architecture of Solitude], his first solo show at Vermelho, seems to have been elaborated in perfect tune with the idea of knowledge and failure that pervades U=RI, with which it shares the gallery space.
The series of woodcuts Arquitetura da Solidão, which lends its title to the exhibition, is an intervention on the pages of The Cambridge Star Atlas, composed of comments and annotations in the form of a notebook about the images of the Milky Way. The result of this combination is sculpted on plywood boards and offset printed on paper manually with cyan colored ink. In this case, the grains of the wood and the original size of the plywood board constitute a third interference on the original image. The result is prints of the entire sky visible from Earth, in 180 x 250-cm format, to which the artist adds error, mistake and imprecision.
Cited and recited in various contexts and circumstances, in the field of the visual arts, architecture, astronomy, ethics, politics and the economy, the legacy of modernism continues to represent one of the main themes of current art. The confirmation of its failure is evident, but, as suggested by Bacal, Cesar, Peters and Salem, it is the acceptance of the failure of the modernist ideals that provides the space for the resignification and subversion of the terrain for the future.

The third solo show by Jonathas de Andrade, at Vermelho, Museu do Homem do Nordeste features three of his most recent projects: the installations Cartazes para o Museu do Homem do Nordeste [Posters for the Museu do Homem do Nordeste] (2013), 40 Nego Bom é 1 real [40 nego bom for 1 real] (2013), and O Levante [The Uprising] (2012–2013). The works are articulated as a collection in parallel to the Museu do Homem do Nordeste, located in the city of Recife [PE]. Created in 1979 by Gilberto Freyre, the anthropological museum has a collection of more than 15.000 pieces representative of the region’s ethnic, historical and social makeup. In this series of works, Jonathas de Andrade experiments with new bases and methodologies for the original museum, and presents at Galeria Vermelho the first version of this paramuseum.

To create the installation Cartazes para o Museu do Homem do Nordeste, Andrade published ads in the newspapers of Recife in search of workers interested in posing for the poster for the Museu do Homem do Nordeste. The posters of the installation vary according to each encounter, in a construction of identity – of man, of the museum’s image – based on an ambivalent, anthropophagic and eroticizing relation.

An installation that is currently participating in the 12th Biennale of Lyon, France, and which recently garnered Andrade the Prix de la Francophonie [Lyon, France], 40 Nego Bom é 1 real is based on the hawker’s cry used to sell this banana sweet in the markets and streets of the Brazilian Northeast. In this project, Andrade constructed a fictitious factory where 40 characters work in the making of the sweet based on a recipe. In a second phase, the installation uses printed texts to reveal a settling of accounts in which the relations of work are made explicit, taking into consideration the subtleties of the personal relations that ultimately come into play. In the project, Andrade takes a fresh look at the theory-myth of a harmony couched in camaraderie, and approaches the echoes of a post-colonialism and post-slavery that constituted a culture of naturalness with the relations of power and dependence, of naturalness in the face of servility, of exploitation attenuated by apparent politeness, and by veiled racism incorporated as a social dynamic.

The third installation that is part of the Museu do Homem do Nordeste, O Levante, is an outgrowth of the 1st Corrida de Carroças no Centro do Recife [Street-Cart Race in Downtown Recife] organized by Jonathas on the streets of Recife, in 2012. As the circulation of rural animals is illegal on the streets of Recife, all the horse-pulled carts in the city become invisible to the law. Only by treating the race as a scene in a film, that is, as fiction, could the event obtain the official authorizations necessary for it to take place in the public space.

For Andrade, the presence of the horses and their owners – normally people who are at the fringe of the city’s (and the country’s] developmentalist logic – generates a contrast in the urban space that resounds as an echo of ruralness, revealing the origins of this region. The video and the photos, records of the action in the streets of Recife, represent documents concerning the laws and their non-application, while silently revealing that the laws were made for the few. Andrade’s O Levante accentuates the contrast between the idea of development sought for by the city and the clandestineness that pervades all the public and private sectors of Brazilian society, allowing it to operate.

Museu do Homem do Nordeste is a project underway by Jonathas de Andrade which presents a new version of the “Museu” each time it is set up, cumulatively incorporating new projects and research developed by the artist.

Gravações Perdidas [Lost Recordings] lends continuity to the researches carried out by Chiara Banfi in regard to musical instruments and sounds, one of the interests which have pervaded her work from the outset of her career, in the form of collages, drawings, performances and paintings. It reveals the artist’s intimacy with the living substance of things, which for her is always associated to music.

In the solo show Gravações Perdidas [Lost Recordings], Banfi presents seven new works of her most recent series entitled Silêncio [Silence]. Here, Banfi took analog magnetic tapes used in the recording of old vinyl records and placed them on sheets of aluminum measuring 160 by 126 cm each. In this way, the observer can visualize horizontal fields left by the transfer of the sound to the magnetic tapes, creating a writing of sound made up of the grooves and intervals that correspond to the pauses between songs.

The polyptych Edições em uma gravação perdida [Editings in A Lost Recording], can be considered an unfolding of the Silêncio series insofar as it uses the same technique, while including a wider variety of shapes and colors. In this universe linked to music, O magnífico mundo novo da música [The Magnificent New World of Music], of the Discos Vazios [Empty Records] (2013) series, materializes the finalizing of a currently obsolete process. A set of 36 vinyl records, also known as LPs, are presented alongside their album covers, in wooden frames, thus suggesting the completion of an anachronistic ritual in our days of MP3, which involved a different relation between the body (hearing) and sound.

Chiara Banfi / Selection of solo shows: No No Yes Please, Galeria Silvia Cintra + Box4, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil [2013]; Sunburst, Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo, Brazil [2012]; Place to Be, GaleryRio, Nantes, France [2010]. Selection of solo shows: Prospect 1, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, USA; Além da Biblioteca, Itochu Aoyama Art Square, Tokio, Japan [2013]; 32º Panorama da arte Brasileira, Museu de Arte Moderna [MAM SP], São Paulo, Brazil [2011]; Blooming Brasil-Japão: O seu lugar, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Aichi, Japan [2008].

Curated by: Cristina Ricupero
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Just as in a good detective story, art history is actually filled with enigmas, myths and unsolved riddles that seem to be only waiting to be investigated and unravelled. There are paintings that look like the perfect hideout for well-hidden secrets. Trying to solve these intellectual puzzles is a pleasure for all ages and seasons and practically no one is immune to this cultural temptation. Seen from that approach, the art gallery almost becomes the “scene of the crime”.

The dark side of human nature has always fascinated and inspired artists but it was not until the 19th century that this aspect took a more radical stance. The subtle links between art and crime can be traced to ancient times but were only theorized in the 19th century when Thomas De Quincey published his infamous essay “On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts” (1827). In this seminal essay De Quincey ironically proposes that murder should be analysed from an aesthetic rather than an ethical or sociological point of view. The development of photography was also crucial, as Walter Benjamin has noted, for the appearance of criminology and its sensational representation in the tabloid press, ultimately leading to the popularisation of detective stories. The detective story, according to Benjamin, could only come to exist when human beings developed the ability to leave permanent traces behind them as unmistakable evidence of their existence. Later cinema picked up on this and became the perfect medium to capture and transform the dubious charms of violence into pleasurable images.

What makes crime stories continuously fascinating is the fact that the division between the criminal, the victims and the audience are constantly blurred. We are all potential victims and maybe, why not, can become possible criminals.

The exhibition ‘Suspicious Minds’ will mainly focus on contemporary artists that cross the bridges linking art and the aesthetics of crime. Beyond crime, there is always the everlasting question of Evil, and therefore any project that deals with art and crime will ultimately force us to examine the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. Like the artist who constantly resists the temptation not to leave traces, the serial killer will “sign” his murders with his own personal mark to ensure recognition. This project is thus the perfect occasion to discuss questions of authorship, authenticity, trickery and fraud. “Suspicious Minds” aims to bring together detective fiction and contemporary art, going beyond the dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste, highlighting the double bind of ‘Crime as Art’ and ‘Art as Crime’. ‘Suspicious Minds’ will therefore necessarily re-open the debate on the links between the avant-garde, modernism and popular culture.

This exhibition will thus invoke the spirits of the modern crime genre in Literature, the Visual Arts, Architecture and Cinema, to transform Galeria Vermelho’s rooms into multiple ‘crime scenes’.

The exhibition’s aim is not to serve as a mere illustration or commentary to the theme. Instead, participating artists will deal in different ways with the overall theme. Some works will directly address the subject matter whereas others will function in a more mental, historic or conceptual way through sub-themes such as: artworks as hideouts for hidden secrets; the modern crime genre and detective stories; the aesthetics of crime (exquisite corpses and the cinematic); the image of the artist as marginal; law, order and transgression; authorship, authenticity, trickery and frauds; the art gallery as the scene of the crime/art crimes; how society creates evil, us (West) against them (other non-Western countries).

The works on view can reflect the obsessive curiosity and interpretation of the detective, the narcissistic identification with the criminal as well as the spectator’s fetishist pleasure. Some projects deal with authenticity and frauds, what could be considered by some as ‘art crimes’; others tend to represent crime as macabre and sublime as in the cinematic while a few proposals provide evidence of public historical events – the social, political crimes. A few projects can actually combine these three main tendencies.

With his monumental installation ‘Strictu’, Cildo Meireles confronts the viewer with a space that evokes an interrogation chamber where a barely lit small table is surrounded by a very long chain containing steel balls and handcuffs. The interrogation lamp illuminates a small piece of paper revealing a statement by the Ku Klux Klan: “We want to steal their time. We want to steal their space. We want to steal their mind.” Here mind and body control are at centre stage. The ultimate violence of these words alludes to authoritarianism, but for Meireles it can take many forms, the social, political obvious sense but also the cultural artistic one. He also offers the spectator the freedom to interact with the piece or not by putting the handcuffs on and pulling the weight of the prison ball and physically experiencing oppression and restraint.

With ‘Apagamentos’, Rosângela Rennó re-works photographs initially taken by the forensic police. These appropriations of anonymous faces that reveal private tragedies and crimes contain a high level of narrative impact functioning a bit like ‘amnesia documents’. Rennó transforms scenes that were almost erased and forgotten, into literary fiction. Eva Grubinger puts up a flag and a brass plaque on the facade of the gallery turning it into ‘the ‘Embassy of Eitopomar’, an utopian kingdom in the Amazon jungle ruled by the evil master villain Dr. Mabuse.

Gabriel Lester recreates a fully decorated and conceivable living room in one of the gallery spaces; although ‘Habitat Sequence’ does not necessarily aim to depict a ‘crime scene’, it definitely evokes it by its phantasmagoric, eerie quality.

Dora Longo Bahia takes us close to contemporary wars as she revisits Jacques Louis David’s ‘Marat assassiné’ by re-painting the masterpiece on recycled army tent; she juxtaposes it with another painting featuring the image of the corpse of a student leader, Edson Luiz, who had been killed by the military police in 1968 during the Brazilian dictatorship, and vandalizes both with red color acrylic paint during the opening of the show.

Kader Attia presents a slide show, part of his ongoing research ‘The Culture of Fear: An Invention of Evil # 2’, which includes images from his own private collection of newspapers and comic strips that repeatedly seem to depict the non-Western person as a beast or monster, showing how these images were manipulated by pro-colonial propaganda pretending to have a civilizing mission.

Censorship, sensationalist newspaper headlines as well as crime and police brutality have featured in Antonio Manuel’s oeuvre, tracing the upheavals of Brazilian history over the last forty years. He will present two of his well-known interventions in newspapers from the 70’s where he juxtaposes political and aesthetic situations as well as a most recent installation called ‘Fantasma’ (Phantom), that creates a ‘disseminated image of the spectator by the press as the witness to a crime’.

Gustavo von Ha brings us back the spirit of the Modernist Brazilian Movement of 1922, including re-known artist Tarsila de Amaral, with a series of appropriations he sets up in a Beaux-Arts décor. In this same wavelength, Sandra Gamarra presents copies of the well-known series by German artist Gerard Richter, ‘October 18, 1977’ – paintings based on photos taken from the media of members of the terrorist organization Baader-Meinhof in the mid-70s.

Lili Reynaud-Dewar, will present an installation, ‘Speaking of Revolt, Media and Beauty’ that comprises a series of sculptures: objects (books, plaster casts, clothes) covered with black make-up alongside a film she has made with her friend and former professor Pierre Ciquel, where they discuss Jean Genet’s life and oeuvre. The film addresses questions such as Genet’s engagement aside the Black Panthers and the Palestinians and basically what it takes to be a writer, an activist and a thief altogether.

‘Crime Master’ is a new work by Dias & Riedweg especially made for the exhibition, consisting of an already existing photo from the series ‘O espelho da tarde’ and a new film. The main protagonist of the film (who also appears in the photo) dreams that he steals his own photo from the art gallery and takes it to his house in the favela ‘Alemao’. Issues dealing with the artist as potential criminal and authenticity are central.

On March 10, 1914, Mary Richardson went into the National Gallery in London and repeatedly stabbed the painting ‘The Toilet of Venus’ by Velasquez. The artist book ‘Elements of Beauty’ by Carla Zaccagnini brings together material and documentation on a series of similar actions by the group Suffragettes that took place in art galleries and museums. This book mainly focuses on interventions where the work of art literally becomes the victim.

Most of Jean-Luc Blanc’s paintings and drawings are totally embedded in the world of cinema and press cuttings. They actually function a bit like ‘film stills’, images he carefully chooses to borrow and re-stage from his favourite films, ranging from classic film noir, thrillers to rather unknown B-movies. He will paint the entrance wall of the gallery like the front cover of a ‘pulp magazine’ signing it with the title of show ‘Suspicious Minds’ and will also present a set of new drawings.

For many years now, Brice Dellsperger has been busy remaking film sequences of his favorite films (‘Twin Peaks’, ‘Dressed to Kill’, ‘Star Wars’ and many others) where he or other actors always play all roles. As part of his ongoing film series called ‘Body Double’ he revisits Brian de Palma and cult underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger with ‘Body Double 1’ and ‘Body Double 26’. Again, in the spirit of the cinematic, gothic B-movie style film ‘Goner’ by Aida Ruilova features a young woman being recurrently attacked by obscure, invisible forces punctuated by a highly rhythmatic and frightening soundtrack that invades the space and transforms the viewer into a voyeur. ‘Suspicious Minds’ will also present objects, props, posters and a film-extract of ‘A Meia-Noite Levarei Sua Alma’ (‘At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul’) by cult B-movie filmmaker José Mojica Marin, who is also known by his alter-ego Zé do Caixão (‘Coffin Joe’), paying tribute to the great master and pioneer of Brazilian horror film.

In a quite different mode, Asli Cavusoglu, mimics the television crime series genre (‘crime scenes investigations’) by bringing together and confronting art professionals with forensic experts. In her film installation ‘Murder in Three Acts’, exhibitions function as crime scenes and art works become murder weapons. While Sven Augustijen’s film, ‘L’école des pickpockets’, between documentary and fiction, presents the audience with two professional thieves that give a master-class in the art of pickpocketism.

Fabian Marti pays tribute to Hélio Oiticica with a series of prints that make direct reference to the artist’s well-known ‘Cosmococas’; the artist duo Gisela Motta and Leandro Lima present ‘Armas.org’ which are life-size paper enlargements of pistols, rifles and snipers found in video-games and will also make small bullet holes on different walls of the gallery, a work called ‘Bala Perdida’; Regina Parra shows a series of small paintings entitled ‘Controle’, that were based on images taken from surveillance cameras right before tragic incidents; Guga Ferraz presents painting-collages that literally ‘map-out’ crimes in the city of Rio de Janeiro; Marcelo Cidade proposes a bench like sculpture which is chained to the wall and where the spectator can comfortably read a book called ‘A Arte de Furtar’ (‘The Art of Stealing’) by José Ubaldo Ribeiro while José Carlos Martinat has torn out a graffiti from the urban space of the city featuring the words ‘Proibido’ (Forbidden). These are the many stories that visitors to the show will be offered as puzzles to be unraveled.

‘Suspicious Minds’ aims to bring together a few selected artists from Europe and the US together with Brazilian artists from the gallery and elsewhere. It is mainly set up as a collaboration and cooperation between Galeria Vermelho and curator Cristina Ricupero. Another version of this exhibition project will be presented at the Witte de With in Rotterdam in January 2014.

Read de full text by Miguel Chaia here

Contratempo [Setback] presents a series of new works created from 2011 onward, which are unfolded in drawings, photographs, sculptures, videos and installations. Made initially as distinct works, they nevertheless weave among themselves a unique discourse that reaffirms the question of the conflict between nature and civilization, a recurring theme in the artist’s oeuvre. The body arises once again as an element for the questioning of everyday imperatives.

Vulnerable to the multiple indications of direction, Contratempo reveals the repressed individual in search of escape. This idea appears in the installation Curva de Jardim [Garden Curve], 2013, created by Chaia for Vermelho’s façade, and which reappears miniaturized in the gallery’s Hall 2. Created with modules of bent iron, mounted side-by-side to form a fence, Curva de Jardim restricts the mobility of the visitors, therefore determining their movements and their understanding of the exhibition as a whole.

Similar content appears in Lança [Spear], 2013. Installed in the gallery’s entrance hall, the collage reproduces iron gratings in the form of sharp spears. Chaia uses the original design of these objects, normally used in houses and buildings as a form of protection against not-always-welcome presences, as a way of questioning their effectiveness.

Alambrado [Wire Fence], 2011–2013, uses mesh fencing likewise used to protect properties, though here the wire mesh and the hardness of the metal are transformed into a malleable network. Thus, the function of the protective fence – to exclude – is brought into question.

Chaia’s keen perception of the chaotic urban scene reemerges in Escrita [Writing], 2013. This installation, composed of electrical wires manipulated by the artist, recalls the typical graffiti “tagging” seen on walls in the city of São Paulo. Electrical wires reappear in the series of photographs Fiação [Wiring], 2012–2013. Above these photographic images that recall the tangle of wires often seen on electrical power poles in the city of São Paulo, Chaia presents images of a gray sky, scratched with a printmaker’s drypoint and cut by electrical wires. This series has a gloomy light and emphasizes the emptiness and fragility of the urban scenario.

In the works Folha-leito [Leaf-Bed] and A queda [The Fall], 2013, photography is used as a documental instrument, creating a commentary on the passage of time that points to the fleetingness of the human and the organic. In Quadrada, 2013, green leaves lose their organic outlines, acquiring right angles, indicating the innate versatility of every organism to adapt itself to the logic of living together with its environment.

The solo show is capped off with the video Aleph, 2013. Recorded in one of the various barren regions in the city of São Paulo, the video overlays the downtown to the city’s periphery, as it appears in a small glass sphere that slides on a woman’s arm.

In her artistic practice, Lia Chaia operates with paradoxes, blending poetic power with a tragic view of the world. Constantly rearticulating her themes and prioritizing new researches involving language, Lia Chaia offers a critical and simultaneously political look at current circumstances.

Rafael Assef has distinguished himself in the current art scene by his works that reflect the limits of the body, by means of the recording of interventions experienced on his own skin or on that of volunteers, which reveal paths, marks and personal marks.

In the solo show João-ninguem [John Nobody], Rafael Assef presents elements of his most recent research. Altogether, the works featured in the exhibition seem to suggest that Assef’s interest has ceased to reveal the particular, the individual, as in previous series such as Amigos Azuis [Blue Friends] 1998, or Cartografia [Cartography] 2004, to now portray more universal questions that talk about things individuals share in common.

Nevertheless, the tattoo, an instrument used by Assef to underscore particularities, reappears in the polyptych Quadrados na Cor da Pele [Squares in the Color of Skin]. To create this work, the artist invited nine people to tattoo various parts of their bodies with squares filled with ink similar to the color of their skin. Later, Assef photographed the nine tattoos. Nearly invisible and presented side-by-side, the images of these tattoos no longer point to what in previous works distinguished the individual. Rather, they reveal what each individual shares in common with others.

The same characteristic can be perceived in the series Branding (os Nomes de Artistas, Nomes de Moda e Nomes de Hashi) [Branding (Names of Artists, Names of Fashion, and Names of Hashi)], 2013. The three sets weave commentaries about collective choices, about specificities of determined groups. Although lacking human presence, the new series reaffirms Assef’s interest in the questions of the representation of the body, particularly in relation to the use of photography.

Zero Substantivo combines new and never-before-shown works with other already known ones, presented last year at the 30th Bienal de São Paulo, or at the exhibition that Odires Mlászho [1960] is currently holding at the Brazil Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, running until this November, both curated by Venezuelan curator Luis Pérez-Oramas.

The exhibition Zero Substantivo represents the natural development of Odires Mlászho’s research since his last solo show at Vermelho, in 2010, Sopa Nômade. At that exhibition, the written word – one of the artist’s main foci of interest – was totally taken apart and reorganized in groups of letters, with the aim of destabilizing the linear logical reading and understanding of each phrase. This procedure, carried out by techniques such as collage, scarification and camouflage, was used in Sopa Nômade to represent the zero degree of language, a “babbling” lacking “clear semantic meaning,” in Mlászho’s words.

Zero Substantivo, which uses the same techniques, goes one step beyond the use of language in the matricial sense used in Sopa Nômade. In the new solo show, typography is used to convey semantic meanings which nonetheless lack proper nouns, as revealed by the title.

Riverrun (2013), consists of 14 parts that constitute a long phrase, using two different alphabets. To the straightforward and legible type used in one of these alphabets, Mlászho overlays a second one created with archaic and “tormenting” types, difficult to read and understand.

In Técnicas Avançadas para Travessias de Espelhos [Advanced Techniques for Mirror Crossings] (2013), the artist resorts to Letraset, a technique seen in some of his previous works, to create drawings on camouflaged backgrounds of images appropriated from magazines. In Plast White (2013), Mlászho scanned logotypes and created visual poems with them.

Pontos Cegos Móveis [Movable Blind Spots] (2013), a work created originally for the exhibition Dentro/Fora, in the Brazil Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, uses protection sleeves for 120-mm photographic film to present 16 different forms of the letter Y. Film protection covers were chosen for this artwork in light of the complexity of information printed on their surface, as well as the role of this material in the photographic process.

Zero Substantivo also features the works Ploter Palavra [Word Plotter] with a set of works from the Livros-Moles [Soft Books], Livros-Mochilas [Knapsack Books], and Partituras para Instrumentos Quebrados [Musical Scores for Broken Instruments] series.

Besides being the forerunner of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp was also a great chess player. In the solo show “Espera”, Gisela Motta (1976) and Leandro Lima (1976) present the 2013 work “Contra Duchamp” [Against Duchamp], a series that reenacts 21 chess games played by Duchamp in the beginning of the 20th century. The games are reproduced in animations made with LEDs, based on the game notation codes. Motta and Lima’s aim here is not to so much to make an exact representation of the games, but rather to reveal the player behind the great artist.

On benches displayed on the exhibition space an image of a seated person – revealed only by the projection of that person’s shadow on the floor – suggests tiredness and impatience. The installation “Espera” (2013), from which the exhibition gets its name, creates an interplay of shadows of two people, suggesting that it is impossible for them ever to meet.

In “Captcha” [2012] phrases taken from a dialogue of the film “2001: A Space Odyssey”, by Stanley Kubrick, were digitally distorted into the patterns of CAPTCHA: an acronym for the expression “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.” The texts were produced by industrial embroidery machines programmed by a computer. In the film, the astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole find themselves at the mercy of their shipboard computer, which becomes increasingly human and begins to control their spacecraft.

In each video of the installation “PLAN Y” [2008-2010], a battle tank searchs for its opponent moving on two distinct landscapes. They perform a constant search for its opponent but once they never meet the war seems to be meaningless.

Time sets the tone for the exhibition “Espera”. It appears in “Contra Duchamp”, represented in the chess games played by Duchamp, in the idea of repetition in “Wait”, and finally in the constant search represented in “PLAN Y”.

Passageiro [Passenger], by Dora Longo Bahia, also presents images of trips taken by the artist through various parts of the planet. In this case, however, the exhibition’s narrative is constructed by video together with the photographic image.

In South Africa, in 2005, Longo Bahia made the video Silver Session, which presents nebulous images of a boat trip along the channels of a river in that country. In the video Desterro [Exile], created in 2007 along the streets of the district of Santa Tereza (in Rio de Janeiro), the artist points her camera skyward, capturing the jumble of electric wires and light poles, creating a tangle of encounters and separations. Captured by a camera fixed to the roof of a car, the video gains velocity until disappearing completely. The video Passasjer, from 2013, was shot in a single take during a trip by train between the cities of Stavanger and Kragerö, in Norway. In this work, the static image of the passengers, reflected on the train’s window panes, blends with the landscape in constant movement.

In each of the three works, the soundtrack features sounds appropriated and re-contextualized for the video shot by Longo Bahia as a sort of travel diary, thus transforming the landscape and adding subjectivity to these grandiose vistas.

For their part, the photos of the series Sem Título (Patagônia) [Untitled (Patagonia)] were captured in a car trip taken by the artist to Patagonia, in 2007. The series is composed of views of mountains, glaciers, beaches and forests, deserts and rivers. These images, destitute of human presence, were created using pinhole cameras or Holga cameras, the Chinese brand famous for its inexpensive cameras with a plastic lens and body. The result is images of majestic landscapes which, due to the technical device chosen by the artist to record them, are either distorted, in the case of those made with the Holga cameras, or else marked by large reddish patches of light that entered the pinhole cameras. This procedure of corrupting the image appears in other works by the artists, as in the series Escalpo [Scalp] or in her series of paintings Farsa [Farce], in which Longo Bahia vandalizes her own canvases, pouring red paint on them.

1. Claudia Andujar is an artist of multiple perspectives, who does not restrict herself to photographs of the Yanomami people, but focuses her camera on distinctly different places in Brazil. Besides the photos with the Yanomami, she has already portrayed the profile of the city, delved into São Paulo’s Rua Direita and captured a diversity of urban scenes and characters.

2. Andujar always focuses on the human creature and is concerned about the paradoxes that involve the species. In the Yanomami series she seeks to capture the being and not the Indian: in these photographs of indigenous people she highlights the profound gaze, the body in its gentleness, in its power and its tragedy. In the urban photographs she deals with ecology and not cityscapes: in these urban works she gives expression to the conditions of day to day experience, to the velocity of the things and the disorder constructed by civilization.

3. She is an artist and not an anthropologist. For this reason, she combines ethics and aesthetics. Her works are obtained by way of sharing, through the artist’s experience of learning by living with the Other, by her awareness of difficult sociability and her insistence on making art.

4. The photographic language exercised by Andujar is the result of a performance. It implicitly involves the action and the interaction of the body with the environment and with the Other. To obtain her photographs she acts with her entire body, displacing herself and moving from one place to another, changing her perspective in reaction to the events. For example: living among the Yanomami, walking through the streets. The artist’s works therefore presuppose action and locomotion. Wandering in search of something…

5. Andujar’s artistic practice involves performance: she took a trip, she included her body and her perceptions in a process of displacement, controlling some programmed actions while going with the flow of eventual random events. She obtained first-hand experience of the different spaces and exchanged information with the environment.

6. It was in this way that in 1976, for 16 days, Claudia Andujar undertook an endless voyage, aboard a black Volkswagen Beetle. She left the city of São Paulo, went north to Mato Grosso, passed through Manaus, crossed Rondônia, to arrive in Roraima. She drove along various highways, including the Perimetral Norte – BR-210. This long process gave rise to a series of practices that validate the experiences she had during her displacements as well as the final results manifested in the photographs.

7. And, in this trip-performance, she photographed a lot. The act of photographing became as commonplace to her as breathing.

8. Photographing stems from the artist’s aesthetic choice for a mechanical support to give an account of the things in the world. That is, it involves the construction of a language to probe and organize the surrounding reality. With this, Andujar not only captures the instant, but also the sense of the moment and the sense of flow of the passage of time. She retains what is apparently fleeting and makes it universal. This entire process is clarified even more when the artist displaces herself in an extensive itinerary.

9. This trip by Claudia Andujar finds its cinematographic equivalence in the film “Bye, Bye, Brasil” (1979), by Carlos Diegues. Both authors hit the road in the country’s North to give an account of personal and social searchings. And, Brazil itself is the protagonist of these two sagas.

10. In this project of displacing herself to different places within the country in 1976, Andujar made the photographs featured at this exhibition at Galeria Vermelho. Among the countless photos obtained throughout the trip, 12 were chosen, arranged in four triptychs. The succession of three images, in each work, synthesizes the trip, allowing the viewer to see the movement of the body and the car in space, while indicating the passage of time. The sequence of three images, in each unit, also retains the idea of displacement.

11. The trip was an experience of the artist’s presence in the world which gave rise to images that convey not only the pulse of reality but also new experiments of language. All of the photographs were made in black and white, showing that minimal resources can best express the concreteness of the real.

12. There is an omnipresent figure in the photographs, which is the black Beetle, acquired exclusively for this undertaking. From within its interior Andujar directs the camera toward the exterior. All the photographs are obtained from inside the car looking out. Each photograph has a double framing: one given by the camera’s lens, the other framed by the structure of the car.

13. Thus, from the car’s interior, Andujar looks at the outside world, recording in the foreground parts of the Beetle’s architecture and internal space. The viewer immediately perceives the car’s windows, pillars, rear-view mirror and rear panel.

14. The show features four triptychs, which always transmit a perception of velocity. The camera moves with two parameters as a reference: the relative inertia given by the constructive parts of the car, and the fleeting passage of the exterior scene.

15. Besides treating on displacement, these photos discuss the inside-outside relation. In these images, the internal space always coexists with the space outside. The dichotomies disappear to give rise to a unity between different places and situations. The photographs explore the separations in simultaneity and manage to join two spatial dimensions within a single plane.

16. When Claudia Andujar arrived at her supposed destination (since the trip is a permanent situation for the artist), in Roraima, the Indians received her exclaiming watupari (vulture being). The black Beetle, used for locomotion during the trip, appears to the Yanomami people as a vulture that lost its feathers and nevertheless has flown far.

17. Claudia Andujar’s photographs peer at reality, probe the human.

18. One triptych presents the city of São Paulo, a compact urban mass. It also includes a fleeting image of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). In this set, the images are more stable, the general tone is darker, and the automobile’s architecture is very present. As though the industrial structure given to the car’s fuselage corresponded to the high degree of urbanization that characterizes the automobile’s surroundings at that moment of the displacement.

19. The general sequence of the works shown begins when the artist and car leave the center of the city, headed toward the suburbs; the city falls behind to give way to Brazil’s interior, to the forest that will become vast fields, because the trees have been cut down.

20. Another triptych shows the forest, partly cut down, in the country’s North, near the destination. The photos of this work were made with infrared light. This results in a bursting light, concealing and revealing the forest – it is suspected that it was burned. What would have furnished the excessive light that appears in these photographs? Only the infrared, or the remnants of the recent fire in the trees?

21. Claudia Andujar relates all of the photos with each other, the urban is present in the rural, and the expansion of the urban profoundly affects the countryside. These works are records and memories, clearly evincing the artist’s critical awareness.

22. One characteristic of the infrared is to make all the living material brightly lit, while the dead material is tinged with darkness. This process offers contrasts between transparency and density, between light and shadow. And, generally, all of the works obtained during the trip took advantage of these contrasts, as if the photographs were metaphors of the conflicts existing in the world outside the automobile.

23. Another approximation between Andujar’s pictorial and cinematographic photos can now be made with the two films by Glauber Rocha, Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (1964) and Terra em Transe (1967). The work of each artist can be read from either a political or formal point of view. The two seek to understand Brazil based on their own experiences, underscoring the presence of the tragic view to formulate the world and politics. Like Glauber Rocha, Andujar also works with the formal contrasts in the images and bursts the light to affect our perception, to shout against a nation’s maladies.

24. Claudia Andujar’s work is pervaded by the political dimension. What immediately comes to mind here is the series Marcados [Marked] (1981–1983) or her activities in defense of indigenous causes.

25. The work of this artist presents probing questions about Brazil – its people and its places, looking at the country through an outsider’s perspective. In certain circumstances, this perspective of the traveler that comes from the outside helps to sharpen the perception of things and to lend more expressivity to the questions of reality. 26. The photos captured during the flight of the “vulture” evince the traveler’s point of view, in a double way: in terms of an understanding of Brazil, as well as in terms of self-knowledge.

27. In Andujar, photography should be understood, moreover, as a form of art-knowledge.

28. Andujar’s photographs are part of experiences for the formation of her own identity. In this process, the photographer must necessarily establish a relationship with the Other and with the environment. To photograph is to investigate the real and to find a meaning in it, while it is also a movement away from and toward subjectivity.

29. For this reason, the political dimension in this artist is not explicit and determinate, since the political content is delimited by existential and formal questions. In Andujar there is an aesthetic amplitude that widens the scope of the political.

30. By using an automobile for her transportation, making it a character of the photographs, and using a high-tech camera, Andujar engenders actions and knowledge in the industrial and Occidental order, while heading toward an encounter with the Orient. How to soften the impact of this confrontation? The trip allows her to leave the values of hegemonic society behind in order to create conditions for encountering the Yanomami people. A period of time is necessary for her to prepare for the encounter between the self and the Other.

31. The 16 days constitute a waiting period. The time inside the car is the time of retreat and withdrawal from the velocity of the external time. The photographs obtained during the trip thus express the slowness and density, given symbolically in the foreground of each photograph, by the internal structure of the house-automobile, while also expressing the meldings and overlayings, given by the impression of velocity, a value that moves the surrounding society.

32. During the 16-day trip, Claudia Andujar probed the country to heighten her own awareness.

33. This trip from 1976 is a ritual of passage: life. It is a long-duration performance as proposed by Marina Abramovic: art. During it, a rite took place along with a delivery, as the Yanomami do. This performative happening that lasted 16 days is a summary of Claudia Andujar’s artistic path, which manages to achieve the difficult and desired approximation between art and life.

São Paulo, April 2013.

Miguel Chaia Miguel Chaia is a researcher with the Nucleus for Studies in Art, Media and Politics (NEAMP), of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP), where he is a professor. He has authored various texts on Brazilian art.

Corpo Mobília [Body Furniture] is Keila Alaver’s second solo show at Vermelho. As in the previous one, O Jardim da Pele de Pêssego [Peach Peel Garden, 2009], the starting point for creating the exhibition is daily life, from which the artist gets the raw material for making the dreamlike universe that pervades most of the work.

Corpo Mobília arose on the basis of research made by Alaver with anatomy books published in the 1920s through the 1950s, and features a mix of sculptures and video.

Cabeção [Big Head], Pulmão [Lung], Estômago [Stomach], and Coração [Heart] are the titles of the four sculptures that use oversized illustrations of parts of the human body. Printed on MDF sheets, the images refer to a distant era before the invention of high-definition cameras that currently scan the human body.

Like a tomography, the video Coração reveals the fibrous layers that constitute the human heart. On the walls of the entire exhibition space, Alaver installed a mural painting that presentes shapes of lung alveoli.

The solo show is capped off by a set of artist’s books, similar to the sculptures in the exhibition, but which beyond the organs mentioned above also include the dental arch, ear and throat. A limited edition of these books, published by Edições Tijuana, will be available for purchase on the day of the exhibition’s opening.

An artwork presented at the exhibition Future Generation Art Prize 2012 (Shortlist 2012), in Kiev (Ukraine), in 2012–2013, “Nostalgia, sentimento de classe” garnered Jonathas de Andrade one of the six special prizes conferred to young artists by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation.

The work reproduces the panel of a tropical modernist house, in real size, transforming the tiles of this house into fiberglass pieces with the same dimensions as the original ones (15 x 15 x 10 cm).

Like in a ruin, parts of this panel are removed and substituted by words from a manifesto on issues concerning architecture, life and humanity, and their role in the history of civilization. This operation removes the text’s contextual content, revealing its activist political structure, as well as the utopian tone that pertains to bygone times. For Jonathas de Andrade, ruin and utopia currently feed a nostalgic relation with the past in which history and modernity take on the role of goods of consumption.

A MARGINAL ORDER

Base hierárquica [Hierarchical Basis] (2011–) is a subtly site-specific work that André Komatsu has mounted in various countries, each time using common drinking glasses, wineglasses and construction materials readily available in that locale to set up an installation consisting of various concrete blocks stacked atop drinking glasses that are apparently cheap and yet strong enough to hold up under the weight, while splintered pieces of a wine glass bear witness to the fragility of its elegance. Many of the titles chosen by the artist are charged with Foucaultian resonances, and Base hierárquica, although it is not one of the most explicit ones in this sense, is certainly among those that best exemplify the way that Michel Foucault’s theory of the microphysics of power is not only at play in the titles, but lies at the core of the artist’s concerns and even, it could be said, underpins his worldview. The discourse on power and on latent or active social conflicts permeates the materials he uses, influences his choice, and in a certain way constitutes the true raw material of André Komatsu’s installations. In this sense, the artist’s recurrent use of cast-off fragments, leftovers, and scraps found in dumpsters, since at least the time of the action-performance Projeto – Casa/entulho [Project – House/Rubble] (2002), also reveals the desire to subvert the values conventionally attributed to the materials themselves and, more generally, to the elements of everyday life – thus instating, to cite the title of another of his artworks, a Nova Ordem [New Order] (2009).

The works of the series Três vidros [Three Panes of Glass] (2012), featured in this exhibition, emphasize the value of fragments, since they are the basis for constructing modernist architectures, isolated on absolutely flat lots, in perfect keeping with modernist precepts. The transformation of icons of the golden age of Brazilian architecture into conglomerations of debris and scraps can be interpreted as a denunciation of the violence implicit in the constructive process, or of the unique qualities of this architecture, whose democratic dreams were shipwrecked on the shoals of its progressive approximation with the social, political and economic elites, which it ultimately validates and preserves behind its clean and simple forms. These are not the only artworks in the exhibition that are born from the tension between natural, fragmented and apparently disordered elements on the one hand, and precise and rigorous forms on the other. But this opposition is in a certain way illusory, as demonstrated by the crooked, raw tree branch that nevertheless fits perfectly as a leg for a precisely square tabletop (Cooperativa antagônica [Antagonistic Cooperative], 2013), or even the image of a tree trunk printed on an anonymous, simple sheet of paper, which nearly seems to be part of the wooden beam that secures it against the wall, at its top (Campo aberto 4 [Open Field 4]). With this tension between opposite poles (natural and artificial / geometric and organic / raw and finished, etc.), André Komatsu’s artworks constitute open fields, as though they were yet about to take place in front of the viewer, instead of being presented in an already finished state.

By directly or indirectly resorting to the technique of anamorphosis (Anamorfose sistemática 3 e 4 [Systematic Anamorphosis 3 and 4]), the artist emphasizes the need for an interpretation which is political or in any case metaphoric for the exhibition as a whole. The key for the comprehension of an anamorphosis is almost always a change of vantage point, a displacement that allows us to look at things from another point of view, allowing us to see that what appeared obscure and abstract is in fact perfectly logical and understandable, and this is precisely what the works featured here require: a change in one’s point of view, the condition of being open to a different reading, to be understood in another way. The bricks, the architectures and the clocks that converge on André Komatsu’s artistic universe are, beyond all appearances, invitations to social resistance. A work such as Time Out (2013), for example, in which a stack of bond paper prevents the hands of a clock from following their course, is above all a social and political manifesto. The metaphorically charged act of stopping time would be impossible for a single sheet of paper, and the power of this artwork, beyond its poetic beauty, consists precisely in demonstrating the revolutionary power that springs from the union of individual forces, able to achieve otherwise impossible gestures.

And this same charge appears in the work which – due to how it escapes from the show’s prevailing logic of tension – can be considered as the master key for understanding this exhibition: Esquadria disciplinar / Ordem marginal [Disciplinary Framework / Marginal Order] (2013). Apparently, the contraposition between different orders is absent here: the two groups of plates, the second one resulting from the “leftovers” of the first, both obey the same rigorous and deductive logic. But some plates are still left over, and return, like a kind of virus, infringing on the bidimensionality that seems to dominate the work, jutting out from the wall and proposing, in the words of the artist, “another model of coexistence.” In André Komatsu’s open universe, the very concept of order is, one could say, marginal, rather than central. Order, as it is conventionally known, is just one of the possible ways in which the world can be manifested – and it is not necessarily the most easily understood way. It is enough to take a step, to look at things from another angle, and what at first sight appeared ordered can be revealed as disordered, what looked chaotic can, ultimately, be seen in its flawless logic.

Jacopo Crivelli Visconti.

From February 26 to March 23, 2013, Galeria Vermelho is presenting the solo show Pelas Bordas [From the Edges] by Carla Zaccagnini.

Carla Zaccagnini is known for an artistic production that transits in a unique way between installation, video, text, drawing and performance. In this solo show, the artist works “from the edges,” – that is, with a perception couched in the periphery – to reinterpret the systems and rules that govern our observation, comprehension and representation of the terrestrial globe.

To this end, Zaccagnini, who was born in Buenos Aires, in 1973, has brought together recent works and others produced from 2003 onward, documents of her displacements to different regions of the world in various artist’s residencies, and projects she has carried out in the last decade.

In Alfabeto Fonético Aplicado II: pavimentaram a Panamericana e tudo o que vejo é a falha de Darien [Applied Phonetic Alphabet II: They paved a Panamericana and all I can see is the Darien Gap] (2010), Zaccagnini appropriates the International Radiophony Spelling Alphabet, known as the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, currently used by aviation companies and ham radio operators around the planet. The work proposes a new alphabet for spelling based on words whose meaning and spelling is international, but whose pronunciation is adapted to various languages and to the sounds of each country. In the first edition of the work, presented at ARCO 2010, Zaccagnini appropriated the Panama Canal’s motto, “Dividing the land to unite the World.” The current version, which occupies the gallery’s façade, perverts the previous one, pointing to a world that is not so unified, since the Pan-American Highway, which should link Patagonia to Alaska, still has an 87-km gap between Colombia and Panama (the Darien Gap), which belies the concept of unification that nourished the creation of the Panama Canal.

The video Walking Distance (2003) emerges, according to the artist, “as a preface to all the works that will come after it in this solo show”. Installed in Vermelho’s entry hall, it reveals images of a walk the artist took on a beach on North Uist Island [Scotland], in 2003.

The installation Bravo-Radio-Atlas-Virus-Opera (2009–2010), presents the videographic record of a crossing through the Panama Canal by boat, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, between 5 p.m. June 27, 2009, and 1 p.m. the following day.

In The North-West Passage (2012), Zaccagnini appropriates the image of the work by painter John Everett Millais and superimposes on to it a text of her authorship, commissioned by Tate, the museum to which the work belongs. The text provides a poetic description of man’s first attempts to find a passage through the Arctic Ocean that would link the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.

The third passage by water between these two oceans appears in Sem Título [Untitled] (2007), which features photographs taken during a roundtrip journey between Argentina and Chile, along the Beagle Channel.

Created between the years 2003 and 2012, Duas Margens [Two Shores], is a project carried out in collaboration with six artists. In the first version, Wagner Morales [Brazil] and Sofia Ponte [Portugal] simultaneously recorded the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, each at a beach of his/her own choice, according to Zacagnini’s instructions: Morales on the Brazilian coast and Ponte on the Portuguese coast. The recordings, both of one-hour duration, were made at the same moment, but at different local times. In 2005, the same procedure was repeated. This time, Helmut Batista, on a beach in Chile, and Eric Holowacs, in New Zealand, simultaneously recorded the waters of the Pacific on opposite shores. The third and last part of the project, the Indian Ocean, was filmed in 2012 by Runo Lagomarsino, from the Mauritius Islands, in Africa, and by David Wells in Perth, Australia. Installed in the same room, the three diptychs – Atlantic, Pacific and Indian – of the project Duas Margens [Two Shores] suggest a fictional space of encounter between the three oceans.

The solo show is capped off by a set of drawings, collages and prints entitled Como darlo vuelta [How to turn it around](2013). In this series, the artist questions the conventional manners of representing the terrestrial globe, in a way that subverts them based on an imaginary universe. North and South switch position. Each artwork shows a different way of inverting the cardinal points and suggests a global reorganization that criticizes the cultural and economic conventions.

Through appropriations, citations, partnerships and collaborations, in Pelas Bordas Carla Zaccagnini constructs a set of possibilities and challenges that suggests a new – even if fantastic – cartography for the globe, based on its borders.

In 2008, Colombian artist Kevin Simón Mancera began a project of pilgrimage through countries of Latin America. His aim: to find happiness. To this end, he chose to approach the problem from a formal standpoint, as a question of territory, using digital maps to locate 13 places whose names refer to this term.

In his pilgrimage, Mancera passed through Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and Cuba. Instead of the notes or digital photos commonly taken by tourists, the artist created, for each country, an artist’s book with drawings of his experience of displacement.

During the exhibition, the compilation of these books will be released in a single publication entitled La Felicidad, by Edições Tijuana. The show also features original artist’s books, drawings, and photographs.

Várias são as razões que levam os objetos ao abandono: o excesso de uso e desgaste, a obsolescência natural ou programada, um desaparecimento involuntário ou a simples perda de interesse do proprietário em possuí-lo. Entretanto, o que os leva de volta ao mercado, através das feiras de artigos de segunda mão, é a certeza de que algum valor, mesmo que improvável, possa lhes ser atribuído, sempre.

O projeto “Menos-valia [leilão] foi constituído por um conjunto de 73 desses objetos pertences ao universo fotográfico, encontrados e adquiridos em diversas feiras, e sua “denominação de origem” – inscrita, fisicamente, em cada um deles – é tão importante quanto sua própria natureza.

Por meio de um largo processo de seleção, recomposição e recondicionamento, transformação, recontextualização e exposição, essas peças passaram por sucessivas agregações de valor material e simbólico até seu destino final: um leilão dentro de um espaço institucionalizado da arte.

O conjunto foi exposto na 29ª Bienal de São Paulo e leiloada, objeto por objeto, pelo leiloeiro oficial Aloisio Cravo, no dia 9 de dezembro de 2010, no próprio pavilhão da Bienal. Cada comprador recebeu o certificado de propriedade de uma parte do projeto “Menos-valia [leilão] e, desta maneira, a incluiu em sua coleção de arte.

No campo das ideias, este projeto deve ser compreendido, também, como exemplo de “recuperacionismo ativo de transformação” – devidamente ancorado na “Ruinologia” – prática já bastante consolidada nos territórios da ética e da estética contemporânea.