Page 107 - ARTE!Brasileiros #43

whether she is certain according to Juliana if the artist continues to produce. The curatorship led me, in this way, to retake some fundamental theoretical
More to the central region of São Paulo, in the Campos Elíseos, the outstanding artist articulations in my trajectory. It was the question of psychosis that led me from
is the French-Tunisian Ismaïl Bahri. With the Instruments show, at Espaço Cultural a doctorate in psychoanalysis to the study of art, many years ago, in search of
Porto Seguro, its first individual in Latin America, Bahri gathered a significant the characterization of deviant modes of construction of subject and reality.
amount of visitors in its opening, even little known in Brazil. “For me, it is fortunate The notion of delusion was very important in this articulation, through Freud’s
to show my work in a new place where people do not know it,” says the artist. proposal to understand it not as erroneous thought or symptom to be eliminated,
With works exploring the question of territory, both physical and inland, but as an active reconstruction of reality by someone who would have lost it
the exhibition had already been presented at the Jeu de Paume Museum in due to an experience of disorganization serious. Delirium would be, in this sense,
Paris. Bahri states that the choice to do work with only videos has a specific a very important psychic work, which corresponds to an attempt to cure - and
motive, which has always surrounded the world of art: lack of attention. should be considered, in my opinion, as the power to create singular paths in
According to him, the video makes people more in front of the work, because culture.
its duration is explicit. “I wanted to create an exhibition as a collection. I have Such work of delusion thus finds the field of art, which also proposes different
the feeling that attention is important. I hope they pay attention to the screen, operations of construction and transformation of reality, inviting us to share
look closely for a minute, two minutes, three minutes, an hour, “he explains. new configurations of society, as explicitly explicitly the most recent artistic
Instruments and Visions of Time are two works with video installations that talk production. The intersection between “madness” and art must therefore be
about the transitoriness of time. The images present in the videos contain moments taken as a political key, moving away from the historical paths of encounter
and objects common to everyday life, which causes the audience to approach the between them in the twentieth century by the idealization of the former as pure
point of immersion in the space created by both artists. “expression” of a subject separated from culture (in the idea of “gross art” or
“outsider”) and in valuing the latter as “therapeutic” in itself.
EXHIBITION SÃO PAULO | PAGES 50 AND 51 But how to convey in such an exposition such complex conceptual elaborations?
A ROOM OF ROSE How to turn such ideas into a proposal of experience in a given space, with
certain works of art? That was the biggest challenge that Places of Delirium
KLABIN’S OWN put me. He was the guide, the sensitive point, the problem that led each of
the curatorial actions and led me to some elaborations that I will here quickly
SUTARTINE’S SCULPTURES ARE THE RESULT OF A SEARCH FOR UNDERSTANDING comment.
The work of Arthur Bispo do Rosario is undoubtedly the one that most directly
THE SELF AND THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE ROLE OF THE ARTIST AS A WOMAN evidences the power of delusion as a reconstruction of reality by art, and
BY JAMYLE RKAIN therefore should have a privileged place in the exhibition. But how to cut his
infinite work? How could one emphasize its force of diversion and drift, the
IN SPITE OF THE PREMISE of talking about the role of woman as a fictionist, A moving presence of the subject to remake the world that incarnates in it? The
Room For One’s Own, published by Virginia Woolf in 1929, brought together texts that answer came to me in an intuitive way, which only later unfolded conceptually:
dealt with the positioning of women as artists in general. The British writer searched in before some works, in the collection of the Bishop Museum of the Rosary, I
history and day-to-day examples for her argument. Under her roof, opening her home decided to have their boats as one of the central axes of the exhibition, around
to the public, Rose Klabin set up an exhibit in which she had to go back to her story and which works of other artists would be spread.
question her daily life to challenge how her role as a woman artist, mother, daughter, The choice was somewhat delirious, perhaps. In the selection of the other works
and so many others was being fulfilled, roles which she assumed along her 40. of varied artists, many boats were presented, surprisingly for me, and I welcomed
She turned away, by choice, from the artistic universe while, with her contestations, she them. Initially, as I said, there was no clear theoretical justification for the choice
tried to enter into an agreement with herself to conclude a kind of self-discovery. “My of vessels and during the preparation of the first version of the exhibition, when
practice as an artist was not consistent with my affection,” says Rose. Despite this, he a member of the Rio Art Museum (MAR) team asked me the reason for so many
continued to produce at home. His intimate research resulted in the production of five boats, I answered jocularly that “in the MAR ... we need boats to not sink”. So
marble sculptures, compromised with industrial residues such as iron and other metals. I took words as things, as psychotic delirium often does (and so does art and
Initially, however, there was no intention to produce a show. For this very poetry). Only later, in the assembly of the exhibition, was the connection of
reason and for the sake of having been conceived in that space, which the ships with the “ship of the madmen” in which some cities abandoned their
besides his house houses his studio, he preferred not to make an exhibition madmen in the Middle Ages (as Foucault’s account), as well as with the idea of
in the gallery Eduardo Fernandes, by which he is represented. He built, drift (of Deleuze and Guattari) in the ephemeral and infinite paths that the boat
with the expiatory project of the architect Mauro Munhoz, an “installation draws in the water, or the figure of the raft as fragile but powerful construction
universe for sculptures that did not end on their own,” as the artist defined it. for those who are out of language, in Fernand Deligny.
“Immersion,” “dedication,” and “delivery” are the words that Rose uses to point The very concept of delirium was thus enriched with these objects, receiving
out what the visitor’s walk should look like for the path she has built for the new predicates, other articulations throughout the concrete curatorial work,
exhibit curated by Douglas de Freitas. The dark route, illuminated by methodically the encounter with works, artists and the exhibition space. Instead of applying
controlled beams of light, is accompanied by an archaic Lithuanian singing, chanted a certain concept, the practice has led me to other theoretical elaborations, in a
by women, echoing loudly throughout the environment. The joining of the visual kind of navigation with no predefined path, in which the starting point becomes
and the musical puts any attentive visitor in a trance. “There are meetings and each new stop.
disagreements in these songs, the meetings would be agreements,” he says. The mode of disposal of works in space was the problem in which the back and
The marble figures in the first room of the exhibition refer women of different forth between practice and thought developed more strongly. The challenge was
archetypes and in different situations. All these situations the pain seems to be clear and perhaps doomed to failure: how could it be a delirious “scene”? How
present. The delicacy of the marble with the rustic of the decomposed iron form a to make an exposition that was not a discourse about delusion, but invite the
contrast that complements. References to the origins of his family are always present. audience to try it out in an unusual way?
The Lithuanian music, the iron, the pieces that go back to the machines and a last The first idea that occurred to me was that different objects and sculptures
work, in the second room, show that Rose went to the core. Such a work, a bust of should merge and contaminate, rejecting the difference between famous and
his grandfather installed in a particular way, should follow to a square in the city little known artists, between works inserted in the conventional circuit and works
where he settled when arriving in Brazil. Sutartine will appear until August 8 in the from psychiatric institutions. The acceptance of the diversity that the exhibition
artist’s studio, located in the neighborhood Cidade Jardim. tries to defend would materialize, thus, materially. In addition, the contact
between different works could possibly incite new looks on them - and thus
EXHIBITION ARTICLE | PAGES 52 TO 54 exposing Bispo next to Cildo Meireles could reinforce the conceptual strength of
PLACES OF THOUGHT the former, for example.
WHEN PAULO HERKENHOFF, then Director of MAR, invited me to curate Radicalizing this proposal, I decided to refuse the media that habitually isolate
each work and expose it as outside the world around it: the wall or stage panel
an exhibition called Lugares da Loucura (Places of Madness), I was worried about in which a painting is fixed, the pedestal on which a sculpture stands. I decided
the risk of this title reinforce the idea of “madness” as a disease, as a deficit to arrange the works hanging in the air by fine steel cables, to float in the

condition restricted to certain people. To relaunch the question with art, in a surrounding architecture, or to position them, generally in groups, on fragile
political gesture of suspending exclusionary classifications and recognizing the bases - tables of legs as thin as possible and of varying heights, arranged in a
field of “madness” as a complex social construction, I proposed to replace the branched and complex, in such a way that there is no predefined preferential
term with “delirium”. route and each one must err between them, tracing their own path.