32nd Bienal de São Paulo - L to Q

Lais Myrrha
1974, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Lives in São Paulo, Brazil

Lais Myrrha investigates the instruments and knowledge forms that construct our experience in the world from the place we occupy in it. Dictionaries, maps, flags, anthems, newspapers and newscasts are a few of the elements in which the artist intervenes. For her, art is an opportunity to throw oneself into areas of instability, into situations where the familiar becomes odd and conventional logic seems to fail.

In her works, Myrrha explores the idea of impermanence and history told from the perspective of the ‘defeated’, as well as the precariousness of the concepts of equivalence and balance. An important aspect of her creative process is the selection and precise use of materials, which reveal the attention she pays to the ability to signify, to function symbolically and condense narratives. In Dois pesos, duas medidas [Double Standard] (2016), the artist builds two towers with the same dimensions composed of stacked materials.

For one of the towers, she uses materials found in indigenous constructions (woody vines, logs, straw), for the other, those used in typical Brazilian construction (bricks, cement, steel, glass, pipes) – two methods that embody ways of life and two different projects of society that, even if they are possibilities for construction, already declare their forms of ruin.

Leon Hirszman
1937, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – 1987, Rio de Janeiro

Leon Hirszman’s films have the concept of work as a raw material and guiding principle. Assuming that the worker is the agent responsible for transforming history, Hirszman considered his task as a cinematographer to be that of organizing the records of the various forms of struggle and resistance of this social class, turning these into its memory. The artist’s films bear the mark of concrete historical experiences, such as the strikes of metalworkers in São Paulo’s ABC region in the 1970s.

This is also the case in Cantos de trabalho [Work Songs], a trilogy filmed between 1974 and 1976 in the cities of Chã Preta, Alagoas State, Itabuna, Bahia State and Feira de Santana, Bahia State. In each location, rural workers were filmed performing their activities: collectively kneading clay; harvesting and crushing cocoa; and harvesting sugarcane, respectively. While working, they sing songs that set their rhythm while establishing the sociability involved in the collective physical effort. Filmed in a language that seeks precise times and frames to reveal work in all its details, the documentaries are accompanied by a narration that emphasizes the importance of recording this cultural practice that, even then, was starting to disappear.

Lourdes Castro
1930, Funchal, Portugal. Lives in Ilha da Madeira, Portugal

Since the 1950s, Lourdes Castro has dedicated herself to the creation of artist’s books, objects, drawings, prints, videos and performances based on her contact with elements from her daily life, especially landscapes and plants grown at her home-studio in Madeira, Portugal. Alongside this, her interest in methods of dematerialization of the art object led to her research on shadows, a central theme in her production. In the series Sombras à volta de um centro [Shadows Around a Center] (1980-1987), the artist places a vase with flowers over a sheet of paper, underneath a spotlight; the base of the vase is the center of the shadows that Castro carefully traces with crayons, colored pencils or China ink.

This simple procedure leads to an herbarium of topographic traces, with colors that emphasize different areas in each piece. Another strategy adopted by the artist consists of collecting materials and creating a type of inventory around a topic of interest. Un Autre livre rouge [Another Red Book], started in 1973 in partnership with Manuel Zimbro, consists of gathered and catalogued objects extracted from different cultural contexts, united by the characteristic predominance of red. The result puts us in contact with the erratic movement of a color that is loaded with symbolism in the contemporary imaginary.

Luiz Roque
1979, Cachoeira do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Lives in São Paulo, Brazil

Whereas conservatism grows and incites prejudice based on race, class, and gender, the future is strengthened as a recurring place in Luiz Roque’s work. Not because the artist wants to omit himself from the present or exercise progress as a way of erasing the past. When he projects what life will be in thirty to sixty years, he searches for that which traverses time as hope, promise, and possibility. At the boundary between catastrophe and redemption – two recurring narrative structures in his cinematographic language – Roque creates films that express the unfinished and cyclical nature of social disputes in history.

At the 32nd Bienal, the artist presents HEAVEN (2016), which takes place during the second half of the 21st century, when news of an epidemic of unknown origin causes health agencies to hypothesize over the possibility of a virus transmitted through the saliva of transsexuals. The premature choice of suspects repeats the prejudiced and accusatory rhetoric of anti-AIDS campaigns in the 1980s. Thus, fears persist in this view of the future, as well as an eloquence applied to make people believe in something. Science fiction fascinates precisely because of its assertions.

Luke Willis Thompson
1988, Auckland, New Zealand. Lives in Auckland

Sucu Mate – Born Dead (2016) is the result of an extended investigative process into the Old Balawa Estate Cemetery, a cemetery with a history of slavery in the Pacific island nation of Fiji. Luke Willis Thompson applied for custodial rights to a small selection of gravestones within the racially zoned site. In 2015, official approval was given to the artist from Fiji’s governing institutions to excavate anonymous material from the worker’s section, itself a former sugarcane plantation.

he concrete markers were permitted to travel out of Fiji for a period of 24 months to be exhibited as art objects, and are presented here after being shown in Auckland and Brisbane. The work is, in this way, a mobile cemetery, and one that questions how human lives and dead bodies are inscribed in the order of power. The project will continue with the gravemarkers’ repatriation to Fiji and resituated within the same field from which they came. In such a way the project simultaneously prototypes both a historical continutiy and the performance of dislocation; two cultural operations with national relevance as the islands within Fiji face ecological change and the continuing submergence of their lowlands.

Lyle Ashton Harris
1965, New York, USA. Lives in New York

Lyle Ashton Harris’ multimedia installation, Uma vez, uma vez [Once, Once] (2016), is comprised of Ektachrome images shot between 1986 and 1998, photographic prints from the artist’s journals, and diaristic video works – all excavated from the artist’s expansive archive. The resulting assemblage serves not only to memorialize, but also to evoke lived moments at the intersection of the personal as the political, presenting a dynamic experience that re-engages time past to affectively impact the present.

Bearing witness to a period of seismic cultural shifts – the emergence of multicuturalism, the second wave of AIDS activism, and the intersections of the contemporary art scene with LGBTQ and African diasporic communities – the installation uniquely documents the artist’s personal life, friends, family and lovers, embedded in a pivotal social landscape.

By documenting intimate moments alongside landmark events in USA (Black Popular Culture Conference in 1991, the truce between the Crips and the Bloods in 1992, Black Male exhibition in 1994, and the Black Nations / Queer Nations conference in 1995) the installation constructs collective and private narratives intertwined both with public events and the subjective realm, to discuss identity, desire, sexuality and loss.

Maria Thereza Alves
1961, São Paulo, Brazil. Lives in Berlin, Germany

The work of Maria Thereza Alves involves aspects of current life or traces found in the present which point to actions taken in the past. Emphasizing the situation of indigenous peoples in America, the artist develops works that address issues of territory, cultural heritage and colonial history. Uma possível reversão de oportunidades perdidas [A Possible Reversal of Missed Opportunities] (2016) generates a discussion about aspects of autochthonous knowledge that are ignored by Brazilian institutions and their non-indigenous researchers due to a context still marked by a colonial imaginary.

Alves, together with a group of indigenous university students, encourages the proposing of topics that are not addressed at the conferences of various research fields, such as health, engineering, education, science, art, culture and philosophy. From these topics, which take into account not only the knowledge of native peoples, but also their scientific demands, the artist produces posters for fictitious conferences whose dates provoke the idea that they have been held. By means of these posters, her action aims at confronting the absence of this debate and the silencing of indigenous peoples in a systematic exclusion of their culture and knowledge in the Brazilian academic sphere and public life.

Mariana Castillo Deball
1975, Mexico City, Mexico. Lives in Berlin, Germany, and Mexico City

Mariana Castillo Deball works at the intersection of fields such as archeology, literature and the sciences, appropriating methodologies and practices common to these areas. She also often establishes partnerships with professionals and institutions from different disciplines to develop her works, promoting convergencies peculiar to the visual arts.

Her installations, publications, and performances construct objects and narratives for breaking down the categorical barriers and bringing science and fiction closer together. For the 32nd Bienal, the artist partnered with the Geosciences Institute of the University of São Paulo and the Araripe Geopark in Ceará State, Brazil, to build the installation Hipótese de uma árvore [Hypothesis of a Tree] (2016), which consists of a spiral-shaped bamboo structure that refers to a structure for the evolutionary representation of species.

The work contains dozens of frottages, a transfer technique widely used in paleontology, performed by the artist on Japanese paper, of fossil and geological materials found in archaeological sites, institutional collections, and building facades in the city of São Paulo. By spirally juxtaposing the records of different elements from different time periods, Deball puts ideas of evolution, extinction and history into perspective.

Maryam Jafri
1972, Karachi, Pakistan. Lives in New York, USA, and Copenhagen, Denmark

Maryam Jafri works with installations, films, photography, texts and archives in projects that employ art’s critical potential to dramatize or investigate archaeologies of knowledge, the production of spaces, and the politics of images. Based in research and archive materials, her works examine the methods and conditions of production and movement of goods in the globalized capitalist economy, and the psychological dimension of consumer culture produced by this economy.

In Product Recall: An Index of Innovation (2014-2015), Jafri examines private collections linked to the food industry and to advertising. Her interest focuses on products and their ads, developed in the United States from 1970s onwards, which were regarded as innovative but were recalled from the market for various reasons.

Next to images and objects from this archeology of consumer culture, the artist juxtaposes informative captions – a museographical strategy for representing artifacts and an approach adopted by the language of appropriation art. The clean display contrasts with the visual appeal commonly associated with product design and advertising campaigns. This contrast causes these strategies of manipulation and production of emotions and desires to be neutralized and put at a critical distance.

Michael Linares
1979, Bayamón, Puerto Rico. Lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico

Michael Linares works with installations, videos, paintings and sculptures. His oeuvre often reflects on the manner in which an object may become or cease to be considered a work of art. Linares investigates artistic narratives through appropriation practices to recover the proposals from other artists and humorously reactivate them in a critical manner.

Una historia aleatoria del palo [An Aleatory History of the Stick] (2014) and Museu do Pau [Museum of the Stick] (2013-2016) are part of some extensive research on how one object or material is given different roles and meanings over time and in various cultures. By using a large collection of sticks and objects derived from this rudimentary element – including a video that depicts its different uses – Linares creates a type of inventory associating the artistic gesture to an anthropological meaning, in an effort to interpret culture in a specific museological context.

The artist acts as the collector who removes objects from their contexts and inserts them into the seemingly neutral space of the museum, connecting them to museological aesthetic values and distancing them from their utilitarian quality.

Michal Helfman
1973, Tel Aviv, Israel. Lives in Tel Aviv

Michal Helfman works with sculpture, drawing, installation, performance, dance and filmmaking. At the 32nd Bienal, the artist presents the video installation Running Out of History (2015-2016), a fiction film which script is based on real interviews made by the artist with Israeli activist Gal Lusky, founder of an NGO that works in places where local political regimes raise difficulties to the access of international humanitarian aid.

The film brings a narrative about justice, historical construction, art, politics, and activist practices. These discussions revolve around smuggling issues and the similarities and differences between activists and artists, as figures that can inspire and influence reality. The talks are moderated by a pair of 3D-printed dice, each side containing a word from the sentence ‘We will not forgive, we will not forget’ – coined in Israel in relation to the Holocaust but also used to justify the acts of violence perpetraded by State authorities.

On the same 3D printer where the dices are printed, a dancer moves according to the directions of the machine. The movie is part of an installation that includes barriers and devices, such as transportation boxes and sculptures. Inside, there is a flat curved metal sculpture with the image of a scale, suggesting a representation of weighing and weights in face of the historical and political condition dealt with by Helfman

Misheck Masamvu
1980, Mutare, Zimbabwe. Lives in Harare, Zimbabwe

Misheck Masamvu is known for his provocative paintings which are undertaken to reflect and comment on the post-independence socio-political landscape of Zimbabwe and the nation’s place in the imagination of the political world.

Born during the infancy of Zimbabwe’s independence from the British Empire, Masamvu’s scenes visualize a chaotic world similar to the one portrayed in "The House of Hunger" (1978) by the late Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marachera – the artist described his writing as a form of ‘literary shock treatment.’ The same can be ascribed to Masamvu’s paintings; they are a declaration of a stagnant and fractured political state.

Though seductive in their rendition of color and form, the paintings can be read as a form of combat. The war here is both political and spiritual, it is waged to redeem humanity’s apathy towards suffering and pain, conditions which lead to spiritual exhaustion. Commissioned by the 32nd Bienal, Midnight (2016) and Spiritual Host (2016) are created amidst Zimbabwe’s changing political backdrop, where recent anti-government protests bear witness to the people’s demand for a new reality.

Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi
1943, Marapyane, South Africa. Lives in Johannesburg, South Africa

Born in the village of Marapyane, Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi learned the traditional techniques of wall painting and ceramics from her grandmother. She moved to Johannesburg as an adolescent. Between the 1970s and 80s, she participated in courses and workshops in spaces that put her in contact with other artists and a politicized environment, which would impact the theme of her works. Sebidi portrays everyday experiences and ancestral wisdom, as well as the suffering caused by apartheid, especially for black women.

From her teatchers and fellow artists she absorbed techniques of collage and abstract elements, germinating and developing into the emblematic diptych Tears of Africa (1987-1988), presented at the 32nd Bienal. The work, produced in charcoal, ink and collage, deals with continental conflicts as well as the harshness of human relations in the daily life of the big city and its disappointments, aggravated by the breakdown of family structures and the regime of segregation officialy in place in South Africa from 1948 to 1994.

Also showing is new work created during an artistic residency and research program in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. The work creates a conversation connecting Brazil and the continent of her birth, and activates a dialogue between the two works.

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa
1978, Guatemala City, Guatemala. Lives in Berlin, Germany, and Guatemala City

Precinding from using archives and documents to create his works, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa attempts to confront historical narratives with his memory or testemony, making use of mediums such as woodcut, drawing, installation and performance.

His relationship with the past, mainly the past of Latin America, is comprised of individual and collective experiences, as well as recurring references to myths. For the 32nd Bienal, Ramírez-Figueroa retrieves the play Corazón del espantapájaros [Heart of the Scarecrow] (2015-2016), written in 1962 by Guatemalan playwright Hugo Carrillo.

Based on a new script – inspired by the original text and written by poet and fellow Guatemalan Wingston González – and in partnership with craftsmen and costume designers, Ramírez-Figueroa created masks, garments and props based on the play’s original elements: an oligarch, a dictator, a soldier, a cardinal and a scarecrow.

Throughout the exhibition, actors reenact excerpts from the play with these objects inside the pavilion and in Ibirapuera Park. With this project, the artist reclaims not only the memory of censorship in Guatemala, but also the actual content of the play, which is vital to the history of the theater and the leftwing political resistance practiced by his nation’s artists.

Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas
1968, Kaunas, Lithuania. Lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA / 1966, Vilnius, Lithuania. Lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas develop an interdisciplinary study where they investigate the role of political, cultural, and scientific imaginations as tools for social transformation and the discussion of public spaces. In 2014, they initiated the Zooetics project to explore new ways of connecting human knowledge to other life forms.

This is what we see in Psychotropic House: Zooetics Pavilion of Ballardian Technologies (2015-2016): the installation draws inspiration from the short-stories found in "Vermilion Sands" (1971), a science fiction book by English author J. G. Ballard, which imagines a world where technological devices would be alive and sentient, such as a house capable of responding to the emotional states of its inhabitants.

The work presented at the 32nd Bienal provides the concept of a future in which objects can not only be constructed but also cultivated by its human inhabitants and users – and vice versa. Using mycelium, the part of the fungus responsible for the absorption of nutrients, oxygen, and energy in a symbiotic relationship with other cultures and materials, participants can create their own biotechnological artifacts (mycomorphs), promoting mycelium’s interaction with coffe skin, sugar cane bagasse, corn pollard or eucalyptus saw dust.

Oficina de Imaginação Política
Created in 2016. Based in São Paulo, Brazil

Oficina de Imaginação Política is Amilcar Packer’s proposal for the 32nd Bienal. Using the words in the project’s name – workshop, imagination and political– and along with a group of collaborators consisting of Diego Ribeiro, Jota Mombaça (Monstra Errátika), Rita Natálio, Thiago de Paula and Valentina Desideri, Packer has planned work sessions, public presentations, and debates throughout the exhibition’s three-month duration.

Installed in the pavilion, the Oficina combines research, production, and learning in a single locale, emphasizing the use of the space as a venue for coexistence and the collective development of tools to intervene in the public sphere. By creating a temporary autonomous zone with the participants, the actions designed by the Oficina aim to occupy spaces in the city, the park, and the media, going against attempts at macro-political seizure and control.

Understanding that the imagination has the potential to reinvent conceptual territories and reformulate questions, narratives and practices within that which we understand as politics, and faced with current sociopolitical conditions in Brazil and abroad, the Oficina seeks to reclaim the power of images in action as a tool for political resistance and activism, and to re-qualify the art experience.

OPAVIVARÁ!
Created in 2005, Brazil. Based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

OPAVIVARÁ! is an artist collective that makes use of everyday elements to modify the dynamic of the spaces in which they are found. They intervene in objects and habits, altering their functions and proposing other mechanisms whose use requires us to unlearn that which we take for granted, reaffirming pleasure and affection as political values. These objects and habits take on new meaning when they are brought to the public and inhabited by participants, yielding situations, encounters and experiences that aim to short-circuit the values and protocols of the systems in which they operate, be they a city square or a museum.

For the 32nd Bienal, the collective presents Transnômades [Transnomads] (2016), a set of mobile devices that interact with the public, circulating inside the exhibition, the park and specific spots in the city, seeking to dialogue with the forms of expression of street commerce. OPAVIVARÁ! redefines the manpowered carts, conferring upon them uses related to the vendors and cart operators’ work breaks, transforming these devices into a bed, a cabin, a library and a sound system. This reflects on the conditions of the city’s nomads, whether camelôs (street vendors) or trash collectors: their situation sits somewhere between law and improvisation, makeshift resourcefulness as livelihood and their permanent state of migration.

Park McArthur
1984, North Carolina, USA. Lives in New York, USA

By exposing discourses and structures that organize bodies and shape subjectivities, Park McArthur addresses the materialization of the politics of circulation and mediation of individual and collective bodies. McArthur's artistic operations occupy border zones and spotlight the tensions and negotiations of power between public and private, between one body and another. By exposing this system, the artist introduces tension to discourses of accessibility, inclusion, protection and care.

For the 32nd Bienal, McArthur created Sometimes You’re Both (2016), comprised of stainless steel columns inside and around the pavilion containing items that mediate intimate contact – latex gloves and finger protectors. Varying in depth, the columns regulate access according to the visitors’ physical conditions. Items contained in the installation are available to the public and will not be replaced. All that will be left is the structure that dispenses them, like a totem open to spontaneous uses. Ideas of encounter and separation are central to this installation, concerning the relationships of the body and its fluids with industrial, antiseptic material, and between one body and another, the institution and the park, and the work and the public.

Pia Lindman
1965, Espoo, Finland. Lives in Fagervik, Finland

In her projects, Pia Lindman makes use of native methodologies and traditional knowledge. When investigating alternative modes of acting that overcome rigid patterns of knowledge, the artist seeks to rethink the conventions of behavior regarding how we feel, live, study or heal ourselves.

Nose Ears Eyes (2016) shows the active relationship between different beings in a multisensory environment. The work is based on the Finnish Kalevala, an ongoing oral tradition, first recorded in the middle ages, but gathered into a cohesive epic in the nineteenth century. Kalevala brings together songs and popular myths, whose section on medicinals impart the knowledge of centuries-old practices of rural communities, including different healing techniques.

At the 32nd Bienal, Lindman will give visitors a treatment focused on joints and bones while proposing that therapy be a collaboration between bodies and minds. The flow of energy is also present in the colors and shapes of the drawings in China ink and pastels based on the images appearing to the artist during the treatment.

The potential for new relationships is expanded to the space thanks to the construction of a mud hut in bamboo and clay that literally branches out to a tree in the park and other floors of the Bienal Pavilion. By paving the way for real and imaginary circulation, the artist challenges our senses and ideas of reality beyond what is accepted or expected.

Pierre Huyghe
1962, Antony, France. Lives in Santiago, Chile, and New York, USA

Pierre Huyghe’s works push the limits between fiction and reality. His work materializes in a variety of media including film, live situation or exhibition, at times operating as ecosystems – gardens, aquariums, or even a museum with programmed microclimate. In his practice, the artist uses elements that challenge the notion of the artistic object. Both the visitor and other organisms can be incorporated into a dynamic network, in order to create a large living organism in constant evolution.

De-Extinction (2016) is a navigation into an amber stone, into an instant frozen in time, in which a living network – suddenly, randomly – come to a stop. The film was made with motion control cameras that capture microscopic images of a piece of amber – a fossilized tree resin which holds the remains of living things intact for 30 millions of years.

What at the beginning might present itself as a cosmos takes on another aspect as the film leads to the interior of the translucent material, revealing imprecise forms and textures, eventually focusing on the earliest known specimen caught in copulation, in the act of potential reproduction. In the next space, De-Extinction (S.P. Evolution) (2016), live insects, descendants of the same species seen in the film are selforganizing in their new environment.

Pilar Quinteros
1988, Santiago, Chile. Lives in Santiago

Pilar Quinteros avails of her relationship to drawing as a starting point for developing actions that reconfigure public spaces and landscapes through interventions. The artist turns her attention to abandoned or destroyed places in order to promote restorations, reconstruction, replacement, or to intervene in the architectural elements of public buildings.

She also looks to debris and ruins as elements of live content linked to the present. In the video Smoke Signals (2016), Quinteros recovers the story of the expedition led by Percy Harrison Fawcett in 1925 in search of a lost city that he called ‘Z’, supposedly located in Mato Grosso State, Brazil. The artist revisits an imaginary that finds in Latin America fertile ground for the discovery of lost paradises and hidden civilizations, staging a search for the city’s remains and forging an encounter with its ruins.

Quinteros questions historical accounts, memory, and the human ability of reinventing the past, emphasizing the fragile yet powerful nature of the narratives of expeditions like Fawcett’s by appropriating their shortcomings as creative possibilities.

Pope.L
1955, Newark, New Jersey, USA. Lives in Chicago, Illinois, USA

Using a variety of supports and formats such as performance, installation, painting, sculpture and drawing since the mid-1970s, Pope.L has made use of humor and irreverence as some of his critical tools. Some of his core research topics are the issue of race in the United States, the reflection of social structures in public spaces and the privileges of certain social groups. For the 32nd Bienal, the artist developed a pedestrian circuit for São Paulo in the performance Baile [Ball] (2016).

From September 7 to 10, a group of participants walks through the city, crossing areas marked by deep socioeconomic disparities. The performance dialogues directly with Blink (2011), an action that took place in New Orleans, USA, after Hurricane Katrina. On that occasion, the artist gathered volunteers to push a truck whose rear was used as a screen for the projection of photos of the city, calling attention to the need for collective action after the disaster.

Priscila Fernandes
1981, Coimbra, Portugal. Lives in Rotterdam, The Netherlands

In her production Priscila Fernandes reflects on the impact of industrial and post-industrial contexts in the lives of individuals and their sensory perceptions. In videos, publications, drawings, paintings, performances and sound installations, the artist addresses social disputes central to the aesthetic decisions of different modern movements.

At the 32nd Bienal Fernandes presents three photographic images, a set of furniture and a film in the installation entitled GOZOLÂNDIA E OUTROS FUTUROS [Cuckoo-land and Other Futures] (2016). The mixed-media images are the result of negative prints exposed to light and altered with paint, perforations and scratches.

The furniture, a set of beach chairs, invites the public for a brief but ambiguous pause, seeing as somewhere faced with the works, visitors find themselves in a state between contemplation and analysis, distraction and attention, rest and work.

The film, shot entirely in Ibirapuera Park, references Cockaigne, a medieval myth about a land of plenty, a place with an abundance of food, nice weather, and no need for work. The installation articulates relationships between the aesthetic of abstraction and the work/inactivity dichotomy, updating this discussion to the context of the present day.