Page 102 - ARTE!Brasileiros #45

FREEDOM IS HARD WORK ENGLISH VERSION
“We are facing constant violence, with Brazil revealing all its evil, the horror of a reactionary carving of the Brazilian northeast) there are a number of his “portraits” performing their
middle class. And he has this idea of the cordial country, of the good nation, that is the discourse performances. And he reached the apex of transforming himself into the symbol of his causes

of the oppressor and that it does not deceive more. Before accepting our miscegenation we have by associating his own body with a symbol of the powerful nature of the Brazilian Amazon.
to accept that the black woman was raped”, says Lontra, stressing the importance of identifying A captivating video interweaves the making of two distinct works: the painstaking modeling
the black elements as fundamental in the history of Brazilian art and in the understanding of a of the artist’s own naked body to create a sculpture in plaster - presented alongside the
mestizo country. “And I think Rubem has taken on this political issue very strongly and importantly. sculptural body of a Bahian, in a questionable tribute to tropical eroticization - and the
He never hid the violence”. On the near future, the curator concludes: “Now we must face the effort a giant pebble-vinegar, an endangered species, more than 30 meters high, found
threat to democracy. And art has always faced this: dictatorship, persecution, lack of support. in the Amazon jungle. The conclusion is clear: “This tree is me”, he points out in the end.
And his role will continue to be that of showing the real Brazil”. I confess admiring Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, whose works he studied in depth
in his formative years in New York (between 1981 and 1993), Weiwei seems to turn these
Rubem Valentim: Construções Afro-Atlânticas authors upside down when he associates high technology, photography and video to
14/11/2018 to 10/03/2019 give a symbolic character to a single tree. Or when summoning 1,600 artisans from a
MASP – Av. Paulista, 1578, São Paulo Chinese region famous for their work in ceramics to massively realize millions of sunflower
seeds. These pieces, reproduced in a great and at the same time individualized form
“Rubem Valentim: Construção e Fé” (they are painted by hand, one by one), condense a plurality of readings: they are clear
07/10/2018 to 06/12/2018 representations of the Chinese people, in reference to the allegory that Mao would be the
CAIXA CULTURAL – Praça da Sé, 111 sun and its sunflowers followers, and at the same time a criticism of the West in his view of
“made in China” as something poor and mass. A version of this work, created for the Tate
EXHIBITIONS SÃO PAULO | PAGES 66 TO 70 Gallery in London, occupies the third floor of Oca. Unfortunately the installation is kept at
AI WEIWEI DIVES INTO BRAZIL a certain distance from the public, which has no direct contact or proximity to the seeds.
Another important work on the show is “Reto”, a facility made with 164 tons of steel
rebar taken from the rubble of more than 7,000 schools in the Sichuan region, built
CHINESE ARTIST WORKS WITH ARTISANS FROM CEARÁ AND MAKES HIS precariously by diversions and overburdening, earthquake of 2008, causing the death of
RESEARCHES DEEP INSIDE BRAZIL TO THE GREAT PIECES IN THE SHOW HE thousands of students of the region. Discontented with the government’s effort to cover
PRESENTS AT OCA, IN IBIRAPUERA PARK up the incident, the artist launched a campaign to raise the identity of the dead boys and
carried out a series of actions to shed light on the criminal conduct of the authorities.
BY MARIA HIRSZMAN Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Weiwei’s production is his ability to immanence things of
meaning, to seek in the appearance or essence of objects and gestures a power of synthesis that
CHANCE HAS MEANT THAT, at a time when resistance seems to be the key word for a large leads to reflection and the desire for change. The words also have great weight in the exposition,
part of the Brazilian population, a large exhibition by Ai Weiwei is on display in São Paulo. either by means of the sentences that he rewrites about ox leather using Ariano Suassuna’s
The exhibition of the Chinese artist and dissident, who has challenged the hegemonic armorial alphabet, or by means of resistance phrases scattered throughout the exhibition space,
discourse with actions and works that are both daring and irreverent for decades, occupies such as that situated on the installation “Challenge “:” If you look away, you are conniving”.
the entire space of Oca, in the Ibirapuera Park. And it retraces in more detail its trajectory, Not by chance, the artist bother to be framed in the field of plastic artist. He says he does not
including some of its most remarkable works, as well as a series of interventions conceived usually go to the openings of his exhibitions (often, one has to recognize himself, because
specifically from the encounter of Weiwei with the Brazilian landscape and the culture. In he is detained, as in the case of the Venice Biennial of 2013, when he had to be represented
addition to being a rare opportunity to get to know his iconoclastic strength more closely, by his mother). And it took him a long time to consider himself a poet, like his father, until he
the gathering of these works helps him to understand the strategies and poetics he recognized that this is the “only possible position for the individual in our world.”
has been adopting in recent decades, which reconcile universal issues such as freedom
of expression and persecution of refugees, a more intimate and personal universe. EXHIBITIONS SÃO PAULO | PAGES 72 AND 73
and for years of resistance to the Chinese totalitarian regime - his father, poet Ai SÔNIA GOMES’ ROOTS
It is as if, crippled by the exclusionary regime imposed on his family in early childhood
Qing, was denounced as an enemy of the regime and exiled for 16 years - Weiwei had
become psychologically impervious to social censorship. Going further, one notices THE ARTIST EXHIBITS WORKS AT MASP AND CASA DE VIDRO,
in his attitude a strategy of confronting institutions and traditions imposed by force BOTH BUILDINGS OF LINA BO BARDI
and a provocative contempt for the status quo. “The time when I was worried about
what people thought of me was behind a long time ago”, he said in an interview BY JAMYLE RKAIN
with El País. Maybe that’s why he uses his own image so casually in his work.
Since his first most challenging action - the breaking of a Han Dynasty vase more than ONE DAY, WHILE FINISHING A WORK FOR THE CURRENT EXHIBITION, Sônia Gomes realized that the cut
two thousand years old - he provocatively puts himself in his works. His image reappears made in the wood used did not let the piece stand. She got up from where she was sitting
constantly, in the thousands of selfies he does wherever he goes (many of them showing to observe better and thought, “Still I rise. She could not explain where that whisper came
the middle finger for symbols of power, such as the White House) and put on his busy from in her head, but she could not stop thinking about it.
Twitter account. Or in controversial works like the one that made mimicking the pose of Then she thought it would be a great name for that work and, in the end, for the exhibition,
the Syrian boy Aylan, found dead in the sands of a beach of Lesbos. His overwhelming which is on display atMASP and at Casa de Vidros, both constructions planned by Lina Bo
refugee action, which has engendered a profusion of actions like the film “Human Flow”, Bardi, until March 2019.
seems to have bothered part of the arts circuit, either because of its excessive use of the In a brief internet search, she later discovered that the phrase was actually a verse
media, or because it felt more comfortable when the Weiwei was Chinese imperialism. from a poem by American author and activist Maya Angelou. Was there something
In his Brazilian season, Weiwei gave wide openings to this use - to some disdainful, to others of common ancestry in this reminiscence? Sonia thinks so, maybe. This coincidence
defiant - of his image. In the more than 200 ex-votos he has ordered for artisans from Ceará finds her in the same way as when she discovered herself as an artist: “There was not a
(temporarily replacing his recurring use of pottery and Chinese carpentry for the typical wood moment when I said ‘now I’m going to be an artist’, no. It came for me”, she says.

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