São Paulo Biennial – artists react to Brazil's political turmoil
São Paulo Biennial – artists react to Brazil's political turmoil
Some artists return to the land and one suggests interspecies communication could be a solution as exhibition expresses tension and uncertainty
Jason Farago in Sao Paulo
Monday 12 September 2016 13.51 EDT
Wearing black at an exhibition opening usually goes unnoticed – but here in Brazil, the black-clad artists at Latin America’s most important contemporary art exhibition knew how to make a stir. On the preview days of the São Paulo Biennial, more than a dozen artists milled through the galleries in custom black T-shirts, whose blunt slogans brought the country’s filthy politics into Oscar Niemeyer’s airy white pavilion. EU QUERO VOTAR PARA PRESIDENTE, read one: “I want to vote for president.” Another said DIRETAS JÁ, “Elections now,” a reboot of a chant from the last days of the dictatorship. The most popular was the frankest: FORA TEMER, a call for Brazil’s newly installed president to jump into Brasília’s manmade lake.
The 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, which opened to the public this weekend in this glorious mess of a megacity, is the oldest such art exhibition in the world after the Venice Biennale. It’s a halting, tentative, exploratory show – and its hesitancy may be a natural response to the wild gyrations of this country, upended by a one-two-three punch of political, economic, and medical crises. Days before the exhibition opened, the twice-elected president, Dilma Rousseff, was bounced out of office by a political class far more corrupt than she. The continuing mega-scandal uncovered by Operação Lava Jato (“Operation Car Wash”) – the largest graft probe in Brazilian history, which has revealed dumbfounding corruption across the country’s political and business elites – has been pushed off the front pages by Rousseff’s ouster, and the new Temer government is accused of attempting to smother Lava Jato for good. Whether or not you agree with the artists here who speak of Rousseff’s impeachment as a coup, the replacement of Brazil’s first female president with a despised politician of another party has dealt a grievous blow to this still young democracy, and given a new cast to the biennial’s title, Incerteza Viva (Live Uncertainty).
The show features a substantial number of African artists, including the young Zimbabwean painter Misheck Masamvu, whose splotchy, color-soaked abstractions display a roiling anxiety. Afro-Brazilian artists are well represented too. Dalton Paula, one of Brazil’s most promising young painters, has festooned dozens of ceramic vessels with imagery drawn from Latin America’s colonial history: missionary classrooms, celebrations, funerals, all depicted in a naive style that offsets black skin with white clothing.
Paula’s unadorned, unpretentious ceramics are among this show’s many humble gestures. Jewels you can find at the after-parties; prepare here for acres of dirt. The Australian artist Susan Jacobs interrupts a pile of raked earth with a spill of molten gallium. Dineo Seshee Bopape, from South Africa, displays tightly packed cubes of soil decorated with hieratic symbols and embedded with herbs and clay. More packed earth courtesy of Erika Verzutti, one of Brazil’s best sculptors, whose wall-mounted blocks of brown are scored with slices, divots and pockmarks. Lais Myrrha, also from Brazil, has erected a three-story tower of dirt, timber and straw next to another of metal and concrete: an occupation of Niemeyer’s high-modern pavilion with cheaper, rougher architecture.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/sep/12/sao-paulo-biennial-artists-react-political-turmoil
Good Reads:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016167088
