Page 106 - ARTE!Brasileiros #45

ART BEYOND ART ENGLISH VERSION
EXHIBITION INTERNATIONAL | PAGES 42 AND 43 no doubt a modern critique of the local condition.
ARAB MODERNITIES The journalist Fabio Cypriano traveled to Dubai at the invitation of Art Dubai

EXHIBITION INTERNATIONAL | PAGES 44 TO 46
EXHIBITION ORGANIZED BY SAM BARDAOUIL AND TILL FELLRATH AT THE ART
DUBAI FAIR EXPLORES GROUPS THAT FLIRTED WITH WESTERN MOVEMENT HISTORY OF ART REVISITED

BY FABIO CYPRIANO IN DUBAI EXHIBITION IN BUENOS AIRES BRINGS LATIN AMERICAN ARTISTS CLOSE TO
EUROPEAN AND NORTH AMERICAN PRODUCTION ALREADY WITH CONSOLIDATED
ART FAIRS are not only concerned with selling, but also with creating value. VISIBILITY
It is in this sense that can be seen That Feverish Leap into the Fierceness of Life,
shows organized by the latest edition of Art Dubai, curated by Sam Bardaouil FABIO CYPRIANO IN BUENOS AIRES
and Till Fellrath, the duo who currently runs the Foundation Cultural Montblanc.
Created from modernist works in the Arab countries, the exhibition, especially for The inclusion of narratives out of the United States and Europe central axis has
not having works for sale, helps to create reflection and bibliography for a segment been a constant policy in important art institutions like the Museum of Modern
where collecting grows and with a high purchasing power. Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and
The show brings together five groups of artists who have organized over five decades the Reina Sofia in Madrid.
in five cities: Cairo (Egypt), Baghdad (Iraq), Casablanca (Morocco), Khartoum (Sudan) For nearly two decades at least, these museums come incorporating Latin American
and Riyadh (Saudi Arabia). The title was taken from the manifesto of one of these works, one of a non-hegemonic sites that is gaining more space, and gave visibility
collectives, the Baghdad Group for Modern Art, written in 1951. to important productions of artists such as Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark and Lygia
In this sense, here is an important initiative of the fair, since it gives visibility to Pape and Cildo Meireles, to name just a few Brazilians, recovering a gap in its
the international circuit a local production quite unknown, as is the case of the collections and programs.
School of White House. It brought together radical artists in 1966, and only three Germany took more time to have such an initiative, but since 2014 National
years later they exposed it in public space as a way of not being linked to an elite. Foundation for Culture (Kulturstiftung des Bundes) created the Global Museum
In Morocco, according to Toni Maraiani in the show’s catalog, “far from asserting program, which has been reviewing the prospects of its museums’s collections.
itself in a school of styles, modern art has become the space of questioning and “ A Tale of Two Worlds – experimental Latin American art in dialogue with the
openness”. Among the highlights of this group in the exhibition are the works collection MMK, 1949-1989 “, opened last July at the Museum of Modern Art of
of Mohamed Hamidi, closer to pop art and with highly erotic forms, made in the Buenos Aires (Mamba), represents one of the ramifications of the Global Museum
1970s, therefore already in tune with contemporary art at the time. In addition to project.
it, Bachir Demnati, Mohammed Melehi and Mohammed Kacini are also seen in pop “The show was a suggestion of Hortência Völckers, from National Culture Foundation,
colors and shapes, but without sexual appeal. to be held on both the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art (MMK), in Germany, and
Hamidi and his countrymen, however, are the exception in the exposition that here in Argentina,” said to ARTE!Brasileiros, Victoria Noorthoorn, Director of
actually presents a late modernism, since all groups mobilized after the 1950s, after Mamba and curator of the exhibition, which shared the task with Javier Villa and
World War II, when contemporary art was already beginning. Among attempts at Klaus Görner, from the German museum.
inclusion in the modern canon, which museums and art historians are undertaking Second Völckers, an Argentine that lives in Germany, in addition to MMK two other
as a way of building a global postcolonial identity, curators prefer to point to the German museums perform exibitions with similar strategies, among them the
five schools as “testimonies of diversity” against the notion of the Arab world as Hamburger Bahnhoff in Berlin.
a “phenomenon monolithic”. Inaugurated in Frankfurt in November last year, “A Tale of Two Worlds” follows until
Thus, according to Bardaouil and Fellrath, the five schools are examples of the October 14 in the Argentine capital and gathers 500 works of 100 artists, most Latin
“contradictions, antagonisms, challenges and achievements of various expressions Americans, not only from the collections of two exhibitions that organize the shows
of modernism through a long century of rigorous negotiations and creations. but also from several institutions, including in Brazil, as Pinacoteca do Estado.
In fact, without the weight of academism, therefore without having to fight against Expansion
something, these groups take advantage of the modernist liberties of representation, The binational shows still represents a milestone in the history of Mamba: the
in contexts of opening their own countries to the West. complete occupation of the headquarters building, in San Telmo district, where
Overall, when viewed in comparison to the “standard” modernism, the works the museum works since 1986, but which used about half of it’s capacity. Now, the
on display are somewhat opaque, with no surprises. However, the merit of the institution has 4000 square meters of exhibition area, all of it used for “A Tale of
exhibition is precisely in giving visibility in an international context a production Two Worlds”.
that dialogues intensely with regional questions, be it in the forms, the contents One of the first images of the show is a 1949 photograph by Albert Georg Riethausen,
or even the techniques. from a group of artists walking in a high wire in the midst of a town completely
It is the case of the Egyptian group, for example, that allied to the entrance in destroyed by World War II. Following are presented several works that represent
modernity the discussion about art with national character, something similar the antithesis of that space of ruins, the Latin America as a place of utopias,
to Brazilian modernism. In the text “Towards an art that is specifically Egyptian”, since photographers Thomaz Farkas and Marcel Gautherot, with images from the
signed by several members of The Contemporary Art Group of Cairo, among them construction and inauguration of Brasilia, in 1960 and 1961, until the projects of
Abdelhadi El-Gazzar, sought to reflect what would be a “national art”. For El-Gazzar the Argentine architect Amancio Williams, like one from 1945 of an airport to be
this would be: “understanding our specific problems and having the ability to built over the river Rio de la Plata.
present them with elements of the environment and a modern mindset”. In one This reversal of what has become the current stereotype of the new world order-
of his paintings on the show, “The Family”, one sees the weight of local tradition German as main European power and Latin America as devastaded land of the
as immense, since adults seem much larger than the child in painting and they neoliberal system - points as how it is possible through art to rethink structures
carry so many symbols of local culture that they cannot even have individuality, apparently definitives.

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