"Oh Pindorama I want your safe haven

Your palm trees, your fairs, your coffee

Its riches, beaches, waterfalls

I want to see your people upside down"

(“Brasis”, music by Gabriel Moura, Jovi Joviniano and

Seu Jorge, played by Elza Soares)

 

A crumpled lead flag hoisted by a rustic wooden-beam pole with a red light illuminates a dark expanse of part of the gallery. This light comes from Mar Agitado (2022), an installation by Edu Monteiro. Lead, the material used by the artist in the construction of the flag, refers to the years of lead, repression and coup experienced in the Brazilian military dictatorship. Next to it are Boxes of Memories Anchored on the Skin (2020), a montage of backlit steel boxes with photographs of Laamb, aka Senegalese wrestling, printed on sheepskin. This same steel holds the photographic diptych of the Vertical Landscape series (2022), a cartography by the artist following the wear and tear and transformations of vertical landscapes in the south of the country.

 

From this proposition, “Rbaits, gaps and horizons” seeks to shed light on the cracks of a complex and unequal time to think about the “other”, the dispute over narratives, constructions of symbols and transformations such as the power of an uprising.

 

In this sense, at the entrance of the gallery we are welcomed by the photograph Olho na Justiça (1992) by Xico Chaves, a performance action in which the artist inserted cross-eyed eyes on the sale of the sculpture Justiça, by Alfredo Ceschiatti, installed in Praça dos Três Poderes in Brasília. . And also for the objects in PET bottles painted with black mineral paint and filled with red earth from Brasilia where the words Forças Ocultas (2008) are stamped, which gives the artist's work its title.

 

Throughout the exhibition, we go through attempts to reflect the history of these many and complex Brazils, as Eduardo Galeano says: "Is everything forbidden to us, except to cross our arms? Poverty is not written in the stars, underdevelopment is not the result of an obscure God's plan. Years of revolution are underway, times of redemption”.

 

The series Páginas para um tempo em branco, of paintings on metal, by Marcos Roberto, presents us with these times of redemption, a reconstruction of colonial Brazil to try to account for the lives made invisible by an unequal society and past, as in Reparação 1 (Reparação 1). 2022), in which the artist portrays Marina Firmina dos Reis (1822-1917), the first black novelist in Brazil. Still in the field of struggles to rethink history, Rewrite-Nova Utopia (2022), typed by Hal Wildson with thousands of letters, phrases and words forming a human mass, alludes to a manifestation in red and black colors arising from the ink used in the machine. to write, so that the past is remembered, and that mistakes and injustices are not repeated.

 

Faced with the current dispute over symbols and constructions of false myths, Fake News Histórico, a series by Arthur Arnold, brings reinterpretations of Brazilian paintings that portray great milestones of our past. Ruptura (2022), painting with thick layers of mortar, dissolves the stains of a past, such as the first landings of Portuguese caravels in Brazilian lands, to create new narratives.

 

Still on forced inheritances, a custom inherited from the Brazilian imperial court was the hand-kissing ritual, a public ceremony in which subjects revered the king. The Beija-mão Ritual is part of the series by Viviane Teixeira, present in the exhibition with the painting A Ira (2015), in which gender power relations are reversed, and the queen gains voice and representation by holding a red phallic object in her mão.  In this same context, we are crossed by A calm still is Tropicaos (2021), by Pedro Carneiro, which shows the relationship between plants and a proud black woman, painted on a weave in pink and blue, bringing serenity in the face of a diasporic relationship that forms the country.

 

Let's imagine for a moment that we are in front of a kaleidoscope device that with each movement we will have varied combinations of visual effects. In this case, the painting Small Carnival Kaleidoscope (2022), by Jan Kaláb, is already an effect of this kaleidoscopic movement. In this exhibition, we are faced with an attempt to bring together small fragments, risks and gaps in articulations to create new horizons where relations of power, precariousness and subalternity are denounced. 

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Erika Nascimento [curator]