Memory and Subjectivity
Twelve artists are portrayed evoking the invisible, the unconscious, the memories, the intimate.
Memoirs that are materialized in matter, in history, in citation and in relationships made by the public with the artworks. From the host of the house, the "Pernambucano" Aloísio Magalhães, MAMAM holds 23 works, divided in two series: Álbum Olinda's lithographs, created in 1981 to defend, in Padua, Italy, the importance of the city in the list of Unesco's Heritage.
No title, from the album "Olinda" (1981) by Aloisio MagalhãesMuseum of Modern Art Aloisio Magalhães
It is lithographs that evoke Olinda's Historical Site -- the High City as it is popularly known -- with their colonial houses, churches, streets, observatories: postcards of the city that give prominence to the coconut trees, to its nature;
No title, from the album "Olinda" (1981) by Aloisio MagalhãesMuseum of Modern Art Aloisio Magalhães
No title, from the album "Olinda" (1981) by Aloisio MagalhãesMuseum of Modern Art Aloisio Magalhães
No title, from the album "Olinda" (1981) by Aloisio MagalhãesMuseum of Modern Art Aloisio Magalhães
No title, from the album "Olinda" (1981) by Aloisio MagalhãesMuseum of Modern Art Aloisio Magalhães
And the Cartemas series, which use a technique that reproduces postcard images to create a new and different imagery from the initially presented. MAMAM's Cartemas, all produced in 1979, were bought and incorporated to the collection in 1997, year of the Museum of Modern Art Aloiso Magalhães' opening.
"Painter at Eiffel Tower" (1979) by Aloisio MagalhãesMuseum of Modern Art Aloisio Magalhães
"Naked lady and two boys" (1979) by Aloisio MagalhãesMuseum of Modern Art Aloisio Magalhães
"Slide" (1979) by Aloisio MagalhãesMuseum of Modern Art Aloisio Magalhães
But much before the Museum's opening, in 1982, the art centre honored the designer, artist and cultural manager when incorporating, in the occasion of his death, Aloisio's name to the Institution: Aloisio Magalhães Metropolitan Gallery of Art, before denominated Recife Metropolitan Gallery of Art (1981 -1982).
This historical memory is also referenced in Ofélia of Capibaribe, a painting from Tereza Costa Rêgo an artist from Recife that uses cultural references of her hometown to mention the Shakespearian character that dies drowned because of her love in the Avon River.
By mentioning Aloisio Magalhães, Gil Vicente, also an artist from Pernambuco, honors the cartemas' creator and makes a contemporary version of the technique.
"Self-portrait cartema - me and Eudes Mota (visit to Aloisio Magalhães's house)" (2002) by Gil VicenteMuseum of Modern Art Aloisio Magalhães
Memory and subjectivity mark this work entirely with discussions that go far beyond a simple reference that mentions art history: Self-portrait cartema.... (Visit to Aloisio Magalhães' house), especially considering the artist's attitude to self-portrayed himself with his peers.
"Self-portrait cartema - me and Maurício Castro (visit to Aloisio Magalhães's house)" (2002) by Gil VicenteMuseum of Modern Art Aloisio Magalhães
Oriana Duarte's work, an artist from Paraíba who lives and works in Recife, is also permeated by those nouns defined in Gil. Though, its materiality is in the experience itself, in the inflicted marks, in her own body. What stays in the museum are the trace elements of the rituals performed in her body/matter.
"O gabinete de souvenirs de A coisa em Si", from the series "I.4.D. nº04: internal map I - Belém do Pará - Ceará" (1998) by Oriana DuarteMuseum of Modern Art Aloisio Magalhães
It is in this way that she presents the series O Gabinete de Souvernirs from A Coisa em Si - a cabinet, a laboratory with objects that retrieve memoirs of displacement, of the artistic journey that is the own matter of the artwork. After a series of public performances (1997 -2002) entitled as A Coisa em Si, which literally produced a soup of stones from different origins that were moved from its place through a ritual for the soup's preparation -- which the artist "ate" during the performance --, Oriana Duarte gathers documents – colored and in carbon printings with fishhooks and lines on a felt as a way to build subjective maps of her own body and of the places where the performances was made – to build her cabinet.
"O gabinete de souvenirs de A coisa em Si", from the series "II.4.J - Ceará state anthem" (1998) by Oriana DuarteMuseum of Modern Art Aloisio Magalhães
Artistic experiments also defines -- and obviously it doesn't limit -- Rodrigo Braga's works, from Manaus and raised in Recife but now with residence in Rio de Janeiro. Desejo Heremita, a series of sixteen pictures, was created in an Artistic Residence in the city of Solidão, in the countryside of Pernambuco. In MAMAM's collection there is one of those sixteen photographs -- a work that is part of the first edition of the Museum Club of Photography and that complementary evidences the antagonistic subjects that are raised by that artist's work: life/death, animality/humanity, themes that cross the artist's most intimate restlessness.
Also in the line of works which memory and subjectivity are questioned by the artist's search for themselves, MAMAM has in its collection the contemporary works of the artists' Priscila Buhr (of the series Ausländer) and Gordana Manic (of the Absent series) -- that together make the second edition of the MAMAM Photography Club -- and Bruno Vilela.
"Self-portrait with sword and belly" (2013) by Bruno VilelaMuseum of Modern Art Aloisio Magalhães
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