[open the box] Fernando Alvim

Art has many faces, many ways of appearing, many origins and many expressions. It can take place in its historical forms, like sculpture and painting, but it can also be photography, found and appropriated objects, films, texts and sounds. Since the beginning of the 20th century it has also been manifestos, political and civic interventions or merely provocative acts, and more or less theatrical events. With Joseph Beuys, a German artist who placed ecological thinking and social pedagogy at the centre of his work, it began to take on the form of conferences, interventions and dialogues.

For Fernando Alvim, an Angolan artist who divides his time between Luanda and Brussels, his art is all of this. It goes beyond the fields of video, painting and installation onto the organization of events, curating exhibitions, promoting alternative spaces, music, the organization of the Luanda Triennial – and all of this also includes and comes back to the interior of the paintings.

As an African artist he naturally sees Africa as the primary source for his material, the information that converts it into a political mark, in the wake of the African modernisms that have emerged since the nineteen fifties. As the European artist that he also is, he situates it within the fabric of contemporary art, using the devices and the freedom of expression that were the major conquest of the last century of European art.

This work, one of the author’s works that belong to the Colecção da Caixa Geral de Depósitos, is an installation in which a text is projected on a small forest of thermos bottles. The text projected is made up of words that, in contrast and contradiction, state “murder”, “fragile”, “free”, “African”, “war”, “violent”, “beautiful”, “white”, “sick”, “American”, “vulnerable”, etc.

Works of art sometimes opt for this interventional capacity, for placing themselves in the poetics of urgency. Fernando Alvim’s work lives off this feeling of pressure.

Biography
Fernando Alvim was born in Angola in 1963. He lives and works between Luanda and Brussels, where in 1987 he founded the Sussuta Boé cultural centre, devoted to contemporary production. In 1999 he created the Camouflage art centre, the European pole of the centre created in 1997 in Johannesburg under the same name. In 2001 he founded three other centres in Nairobi, Dakar and Luanda. He is simultaneously an artist, curator and exhibition producer, being the director of the Luanda Triennial since its beginning. He is self-taught, and began his career as a visual artist at the end of the seventies. He was a member of the exhibition Africa remix, contemporary art of a continent, which travelled to the Museum Kunst Palast (Düsseldorf), Hayward Gallery (London), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Moderna Museet (Stockholm) and Johannesburg Art Gallery (Johannesburg). In 2006, along with Simon Njami, he curated the project Check list-Luanda pop, at the Venice Biennial.

Bibliography
Looking both ways: art of the con- temporary African diaspora (cat.), New York/Gent, Museum for African Art/Snoeck-Ducaju & Zoon, 2003.
Africa remix, contemporary art of a continent (cat.), Johannesburg, Johannesburg Art Gallery, 2007.