In Splétch!, red paint drips down the gallery entrance. Comic book onomatopoeias depicting punches, kicks, and fights – “SPLÉCHT!””PUNCH” – are painted over it.

Destiné au grand public. Se lit sans effort.

Soyez modernes,
collectionneurs, musées.
Si vous avez des peintures anciennes,
ne désespérez pas.
Gardez vos souvenirs
mais détournez-les
pour qu’ils correspondent à votre époque.
Pourquoi rejeter l’ancien
si on peut le moderniser
avec quelques traits de pinceau ?
Ça jette de l’actualité
sur votre vielle culture.
Soyez à la page,
et distinguésdu même coup.
La peinture, c’est fini.
Autant donner le coup de grâce.
Détournez.
Vive la peinture.

Asger JORN, « Peinture détournée », Paris, Galerie Rive-Gauche, mai 1959

Minas (trabalho em andamento), is a series of portraits produced between 1964 and 2022. The title is a double entendre in the Portuguese language where “Minas” means both a young girl (a girl from the hood) and a landmine. In this series, the artist uses her own childhood drawings done between 1964 and 1973 as support in the composition of an ongoing series of portraits of women who are important to her artistic trajectory.

Minas (trabalho em andamento), is a series of portraits produced between 1964 and 2022. The title is a double entendre in the Portuguese language where “Minas” means both a young girl (a girl from the hood) and a landmine. In this series, the artist uses her own childhood drawings done between 1964 and 1973 as support in the composition of an ongoing series of portraits of women who are important to her artistic trajectory.

“(…)At the entrance of the exhibition is a drawing made by Dora as a child in the 1960s. The image depicts an urban cityscape with chaotic traffic, accidents, buildings, a church, a school, and heavy rain sketched over the drawing, from which the word Brasil emerges. This work has not been updated.(…)”

– Excerpt taken from the text “Dora’s Labyrinth”, by Gabriel Zimbardi

“(…)Longo Bahia has covered a series of her own paintings from the 1980s to 2000s with new layers of paint, images, and meanings. Like Jorn, in her Desfigurações, she does not treat the original image as a memory to be recovered but rather as a plastic element to be transformed. Her interventions not only alter the appearance of the artwork but also redefine its meaning, allowing the previous image to remain as a structural and semantic foundation. This movement not only visually transforms the surfaces but also preserves or re-signifies their contents, creating new meanings from the relationship between the original and the intervention.(…)”

– Excerpt taken from the text “Dora’s Labyrinth”, by Gabriel Zimbardi

The video New Babylon (2024) is a collage of texts and images produced between February and June 2024 during a Fellowship at NIAS (Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study). It is the result of a theoretical-practical investigation into the social role of the artist, highlighting the similarities and differences between the actions of the International Situationists and Provos.*

The video aims to demonstrate the relevance of the concepts and procedures of the Situationists and Provos in shaping a representation of contemporary reality and to foster an in-depth debate on the relationship between art, politics, and political activism.

_{*International Situationists: an international artistic-political movement founded in Italy (1957–1972).
Provos: a Dutch anarchist protest movement founded in Amsterdam (1965–1967).}

“(…)Her new paintings reject the purity of the medium: they are not flat, they do not emphasize technical processes and materiality, they do not reject figuration, and above all, they deny the idea of progression. Her Desfigurações flatten the temporal gap between different versions of Dora, spanning 30 or 40 years.(…)”

– Excerpt taken from the text “Dora’s Labyrinth”, by Gabriel Zimbardi

Este vídeo foi produzido para a 21ª conferência anual Historical Materialism: “Countering the Plague: Forces of Reaction and War and How to Fight Them”, realizada na School of Oriental and African Studies + Birkbeck College, em Londres, de 7 a 10 de novembro de 2024.

“(…)She copies images from artists she admires and considers radical, layering them onto her own. Her approach is not referential; she even states that it doesn’t really matter whose images they are, since her use of them is driven by her own desires, not mere reproduction. “I am updating my work,” she says.(…)”

– Excerpt taken from the text “Dora’s Labyrinth”, by Gabriel Zimbardi

“(…)Her new paintings reject the purity of the medium: they are not flat, they do not emphasize technical processes and materiality, they do not reject figuration, and above all, they deny the idea of progression. Her Desfigurações flatten the temporal gap between different versions of Dora, spanning 30 or 40 years.(…)”

— Excerpt taken from the text “Dora’s Labyrinth”, by Gabriel Zimbardi

“(…)Longo Bahia has covered a series of her own paintings from the 1980s to 2000s with new layers of paint, images, and meanings. Like Jorn, in her Desfigurações, she does not treat the original image as a memory to be recovered but rather as a plastic element to be transformed. Her interventions not only alter the appearance of the artwork but also redefine its meaning, allowing the previous image to remain as a structural and semantic foundation. This movement not only visually transforms the surfaces but also preserves or re-signifies their contents, creating new meanings from the relationship between the original and the intervention.(…)”

– Excerpt taken from the text “Dora’s Labyrinth”, by Gabriel Zimbardi

Autobiografia obscena [Obscene Autobiography], 2022, is a video created for the Latin American Speaker Series (LASS) hosted by Sur Gallery (Toronto, Canada) in May 2022. In the video, initially shown as a videoconference, images and sounds from various works by Longo Bahia are superimposed or juxtaposed. A female voice narrates a story created from the appropriation and collage of texts from different authors in the English and the Portuguese language. The text was translated into Portuguese for the audio with English subtitles. The title Autobiografia obscena is the result of the mutilation and appropriation of two of the texts used in the video: Autobiography of Red, by Canadian Anne Carson, and A obscena senhora D [The Obscene Lady D], by Brazilian Hilda Hilst.

his video was produced for the series Art in Tension: Artists & Scholars in Conversation II, organized by PLAS: Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton University (USA).

The video’s first presentation was part of a conversation between Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Dora Longo Bahia on April 7, 2021, moderated by Gabriela Nouzeilles.

Invited by curator Cecilia Fajardo-Hill to discuss her work, Longo Bahia created this, the first in a series of lecture-videos, where the artist overlays her work with materials appropriated from other authors, following the logic of détournement. Coined by Guy Debord in his book The Society of the Spectacle (1967), this concept, among many points, positions copying as the opposite of citation, referring to the practice of transforming an image or element to subvert its original use, rather than simply reproducing or quoting it.

From this, Longo Bahia developed a metalinguistic method of discourse where self-reference gives way to a cacophony that shapes her research.

“(…)Dora also displays a set of cloths she used for years to clean her brushes. Each one, imbued with accidental pictorial qualities and much time spent in the studio, bears the name of a red pigment, a fundamental color in her work.(…)”

– Excerpt taken from the text “Dora’s Labyrinth”, by Gabriel Zimbardi

“(…)Dora also displays a set of cloths she used for years to clean her brushes. Each one, imbued with accidental pictorial qualities and much time spent in the studio, bears the name of a red pigment, a fundamental color in her work.(…)”

– Excerpt taken from the text “Dora’s Labyrinth”, by Gabriel Zimbardi

“(…)Dora also displays a set of cloths she used for years to clean her brushes. Each one, imbued with accidental pictorial qualities and much time spent in the studio, bears the name of a red pigment, a fundamental color in her work.(…)”

– Excerpt taken from the text “Dora’s Labyrinth”, by Gabriel Zimbardi

“(…)Dora also displays a set of cloths she used for years to clean her brushes. Each one, imbued with accidental pictorial qualities and much time spent in the studio, bears the name of a red pigment, a fundamental color in her work.(…)”

– Excerpt taken from the text “Dora’s Labyrinth”, by Gabriel Zimbardi

“(…)Dora also displays a set of cloths she used for years to clean her brushes. Each one, imbued with accidental pictorial qualities and much time spent in the studio, bears the name of a red pigment, a fundamental color in her work.(…)”

– Excerpt taken from the text “Dora’s Labyrinth”, by Gabriel Zimbardi

“(…)Dora also displays a set of cloths she used for years to clean her brushes. Each one, imbued with accidental pictorial qualities and much time spent in the studio, bears the name of a red pigment, a fundamental color in her work.(…)”

– Excerpt taken from the text “Dora’s Labyrinth”, by Gabriel Zimbardi

“(…)Dora also displays a set of cloths she used for years to clean her brushes. Each one, imbued with accidental pictorial qualities and much time spent in the studio, bears the name of a red pigment, a fundamental color in her work.(…)”

– Excerpt taken from the text “Dora’s Labyrinth”, by Gabriel Zimbardi

“(…)This contextual update that Dora Longo Bahia applies to her own work operates on multiple levels: a visceral and violent reaction to global events, a reference to the rejection of The Spectacle by the Situationist International, and a reflection on the very medium of painting.(…)”

– Excerpt taken from the text “Dora’s Labyrinth”, by Gabriel Zimbardi

This video was produced for the event “Arte e política, histórias de uma relação crítica” (Art and Politics: Histories of a Critical Relationship), organized by the curatorial group of Ateliê397.

Presented during the debate on aesthetics and politics with Dora Longo Bahia and Vladimir Safatle, moderated by Thais Rivitti, the video was part of the program at the Centro de Pesquisa e Formação do SESC São Paulo on April 11, 2023.

The event took place in a context of transformations in Brazil, alongside artistic manifestations in different parts of the world, revisiting those that persist or reemerge with new approaches. The course explored the relationship between art and politics through five sessions, discussing philosophical thought in artistic-political action, art as collective production, exhibitions as political acts, the role of art in journalism, and the connections between art and the ecological crisis.

Dora Longo Bahia and Vladimir Safatle examined the intersections between aesthetics and politics from the perspectives of philosophy and artistic practice, outlining key issues for contemporary artistic-political practice.

“(…)She copies images from artists she admires and considers radical, layering them onto her own. Her approach is not referential; she even states that it doesn’t really matter whose images they are, since her use of them is driven by her own desires, not mere reproduction. “I am updating my work,” she says.(…)”

– Excerpt taken from the text “Dora’s Labyrinth”, by Gabriel Zimbardi

Corpo Político [Political Body], 2021, is a video produced for the program Political Bodies, Gender and Race, for the virtual conference WORLDVIEWS : Latin American Art and the Decolonial Turn, held at the Centre for Visual Culture of the University of Cambridge.

The work, originally shown as a videoconference, is divided into chapters: the Introduction includes excerpts from an audiobook version of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651). Chapter I focuses on Western Civilization [the head (mind or spirit) vs. the body]; chapter II on Colonization [the “human being” (or the “civilized” white man) vs. the other], chapter III on Power [the phallus (or the State) vs. her], chapter IV on Rape (the male subject vs. the female object), chapter V on the Reified Body (body vs. flesh), chapter VI on the Collective Body (the system vs. the “numerous”), and chapter VII on Revolution.