Poema (Poem)

Lenora de Barros was born in 1953 in São Paulo, where she continues to live and work. In 1970 she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in linguistics and immediately began considering the interactions between her already developed poetry practice and visual art. In 1979 she developed one of her first visual poems, Poema, a series of photographs depicting the artist’s tongue interacting with the mechanism of a typewriter. While text always remained central to her work, de Barros’s practice later expanded to live, video-recorded, or photographed performance. Still actively creating today, de Barros incorporates tenets of pop art, Fluxus, conceptual art, and body art to explore bisual and verbal communication