Explore the 34th Bienal: Though It's Dark, Still I Sing
Take a virtual tour of the 34th Bienal de São Paulo artworks
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Though It's Dark, Still I Sing
"The starting point for the curatorial project of the 34th Bienal de São Paulo was the desire to unfold the show, to activate each moment of its construction and to sharpen the vitality of an exhibition of this scale."
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"Inaugurated on February 8, 2020, with a performance and a solo exhibition, it would continue with events held in partnership with several cultural institutions in the city and culminate in the large group exhibition to be held in this pavilion in December of that same year."
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"In the new scenario imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, various aspects of this choreography were modified, exhibitions and performances had to be canceled and the exhibition Wind was born, conveying the sense of distance and absence that still pervades our lives."
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"A long year later, we still believe in the potential of an exhibition conceived to multiply the opportunities for an encounter between works and people, in which their singularities intersect and transform each other."
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"Some of the works will be clear, other opaque; some messages will be heard as screams, other as echoes."
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"We do not have to understand everything, nor everyone; rather, the aim is to talk in our own language while knowing that there are things that other languages name and which we do not know how to express."
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"Searching for a language to delineate the force fields created by the combined presence of artworks from very different places and times, we proposed some objects, coupled with their stories, as statements."
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"These statements are scattered around the exhibition, suggesting a tone for the artworks around them to be read in, conveying the curatorship’s concerns and reflections, making them tangible."
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"Throughout these months of work, surrounded by collapses of every sort, we have repeatedly asked the question: what forms of art and ways of being in the world are currently possible and necessary? In dark times, what are the songs we need to listen to, and to sing?"
Based on the curatorial project of the 34th Bienal de São Paulo. Signed by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, Paulo Miyada, Carla Zaccagnini, Francesco Stocchi and Ruth Estévez.
