Page 108 - ARTE!Brasileiros #45

ART BEYOND ART ENGLISH VERSION
canonical representations of the female face throughout art history. Andrea Giunta democratic legitimacy leads to loss of the right to expression, to self-censorship,
emphasizes the idea that these artists break with the place of the look the body and to the institutional instability, among other consequences, whose tentacles extend
the place of the woman, that even the modernism that was outside, now changes into our days. To investigate the effects of this trauma in the artistic field, the Tomie
inwards. From the woman to herself and her peers. Ohtake Institute opens in September 4 the exhibition “AI-5: Not yet finished to finish”.
Through the self-portrait, artists like Anna Bella Geiger interrogate identities in This is an exhibition at the same time archivistic and artistic, historical and
transit, as in the series in which the daily Indian appears side by side with portraits contemporary. The backbone of the event are documents, statements, records,
of their daily life. The video performance of Lenora de Barros, 1984, is a literal and works collected over a year of intense research. Were consulted about 40
divider of the show: suspended between two rooms generates organicity to space. artists, not only visual but also from other fields of culture such as music and
With Lenora a written text can turn into video as well as a performance unfold cinema, in an attempt to create a broader panorama of effects and responses
in video performance. Contrary to the general discourse, Roser Bru, daughter of in the period given by society. “It is a kind of essay about the power relationship
a Catalan militant, bows to the only Latin American writer to receive the Nobel between creative field and authoritarian forces from the era”, summarises Paul
Prize, the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. What is produced between the look and Miyata, creator and curator of the show. Encompassing a broad period from 1964,
the space does not go unnoticed among women artists and violence is a constant year in which happened the coup d’état, until 1980, when it starts the process of
theme. Anna Maria Maiolino self-portraits with scissors and blades placed between opening, the exhibition is divided into different temporal cores.
her tongue, in a scene of tension. The face comes to the surface and becomes a The four years preceding the regime hardening caused by the AI-5 are seen
territory of subtle questions in the friction between drawing and photography, a by Miyata under the aegis of the concept of “opinion” that permeates a series
territory visited by one of the key contemporary artists, Argentina’s Liliana Porter. of initiatives (exhibitions, show, theatre ...) and synthesizes the viable way. At a
Anyone who went to the trouble of leafing through catalogs of biennials and time when the party political action was no longer possible, there remained the
exhibitions of the two decades focused by the curators discovered the erasure of the expression of ideas and the notion of counterculture, of strengthening against the
female artist. However, the show uncovered and harvested a variety of them, little forbidden as a form of resistance. “With the decree the opinion was criminalized,”
known, working themes and different styles, within a diversity and resistance. There said Miyata, for whom this active generation in the mid-1960 represents the point
are still cases of erasure by the art system as occurred with Carolee Schneemann of climax and breaks of a highly engaged aesthetic design. Among the works of
who began her work in the 1960s and was only internationally recognized years this period are the work “Che Guevara dead or alive” by Claudio Tozzi, which was
later. It was awarded in 2017 with the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. Andrea destroyed by extreme right-wing militants in Salão de Brasilia of 1967 (and later
Giunta says that in the seven years it took to carry out the exhibition some data was rebuilt by the artist).
changed in the research. “There has been a change in how we approach feminism. From the strengthening of censorship, in 1968, some strategies of evasion were
The figure of feminicide and the violence with the body and the psyche of the being adopted. Artists such as Cildo Meireles, Artur Barrio and Antonio Manuel
women were becoming generalizing in an impressive way “. The “microphysics of began to incorporate guerrilla strategies, such as infiltration in other systems, go
power”, as Michel Foucault says, is the power that acts in everyday life as a relation. underground, and use the idea of death as a symbol of the political moment. One
For him, power is producer before repressor, produces ways of living, produces of the highlights of the core are the drawings made in prison by Zarlos Zílio, that
realities. Some of the works deal with the process of change, the transformation the artist agreed to show only in 1996 and were rarely displayed.
of the role of women. Other ways to give continuity to the artistic production in such a hostile environment
Many artists the curators still did not know, were discovered during the research were the adoption of a certain experimental marginality, challenging the moralistic
and, for the show in São Paulo, were added four more Brazilian. In addition to existing codes; the use of a high level of encryption as a form of self-protection
the artists who have exhibited at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the or the use of alternative circuits as film clubs and mail art. Artists such as Paulo
Brooklin Museum in New York, we have included works by Wilma Martins, Yolanda Bruscky, Anna Bella Geiger, Anna Maria Maiolino (which appears with a project, never
Freyre, Maria do Carmo Secco and Nelly Gutmacher “. Cecilia Fajardo says that in carried out, about the missing), Wlademir Dias Pino, Claudio Tozzi and Antonio
five years, only the São Paulo Pinacoteca, with the help of its director Jochen Volz, Dias are some of the names included. Recently deceased, Dias is present with two
managed to make the itinerancy possible, even with the economic crisis arrives in pretty emblematic works from the New Figuration final period: an unpublished
Brazil to collaborate with the reflection on the place of the woman, and casually notebook which starts arriving in Paris in 1968, in which he writes, in reference to
in a moment of indignation about the neglect of the current government in front the anthological series of black paintings: “Negative Art, to a negative country:
of episodes like the death of the alderwoman and militant Marielle Franco, still paintings entirely black with only a white word “, in a clear process of mourning,
not solved by the justice after five months of her murder, and the daily cases of and “ Heads “, consisting of urns, sealed boxes, painted in black, arranged as if
femicide reported in Brazil. they were severed heads.
Ending the exhibition, Miyada recalls two major movements of reaffirmation of
EXHIBITION SÃO PAULO | PAGES 58 TO 62 Brazilian and Latin American art and culture, represented by two central figures in
AI-5: STILL NOT FINISHED YET this process of reflection and systematization of Brazilian art: the project prepared
by Mario Pedrosa for the reconstruction of the MAM-RJ after its destruction in a fire
in 1978 and the Meeting of Latin America Art Critics, organized by Aracy Amaral at
ARTISTS SUCH AS CILDO MEIRELES, ARTUR BARRIO AND CARLOS PASQUETTI the Biennale, in 1981. And, to show that it is a more general problem, with evident
BEGAN TO INCORPORATE GUERRILLA STRATEGIES consequences nowadays, Miyada incorporates a small but potent contemporary
art core, in which artists such as Paul Nazareth, Matheus Rocha Pitta and Bruno
BY MARIA HIRZMAN Dunley, among others, deal with this still open scar.
Not even the idea of this period production as something monolithic nor the possible
FIFTY YEARS AGO it was published the Institutional Act No. 5. The decree, criticism that political engagement is done at the expense of a formal quality of the
which suspended constitutional guarantees in the country, symbolises the moment works is sustained on such a detailed research like this. The diversity and fertility
of consolidation of the military regime and leaves deep marks in brazilian society. are required and comprise a rich and diversified plot. It’s like “a historical puzzle,”
The state of exception reaches not only the direct victims of the regime, who says Miyata that last year had already organized “Bone”, an exhibition-call for the
have experienced torture, death and exile, but society as a whole. The rupture of right of defence of Rafael Braga. Initially, his idea was to try to perform an action in

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