17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil
www.videobrasil.org.br
www.sescsp.org.br
Bearing a new name and introducing significant structural modifications over its past editions, the 17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil broadens its scope in several directions. The Southern Panoramas competitive exhibition now opens itself up to the multiplicity of medias that defines current production, aside from remaining a traditional showcase for recent production from Latin America, Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Oceania. This change aligns the Festival with the nature of contemporary artistic practices and confronts the vast production of representations that constitutes visuality today.
The creation of the Videobrasil Open Studio Prize underlines the shift in the Festival's format and reach, and expands Associação Cultural Videobrasil's set of fostering actions, in partnership with SESC. Through a public invitation issued in June 2010, four artists aged up to 30 and based in São Paulo were selected to develop commissioned works of art while interacting with one another at Casa Tomada, a recently established facility in São Paulo turned to artistic reflection and production. Entrants were selected by the curator and editor Marcelo Rezende, the curator, art critic and professor Marcos Moraes, the artist and scholar Ana Tavares, and by the Casa Tomada board, comprised of curators Thereza Farkas and Tainá Azeredo.
The shortlisted artists were Guilherme Peters (Brazil, 1987), who has featured in collective exhibitions at Galeria Vermelho and Itaú Cultural, in São Paulo; Regina Parra (Brazil, 1981), who was awarded the Iberê Camargo Scholarship in 2009; Paulo Nimer PJota (Brazil, 1988), who has featured in collective exhibitions in Brazil, Switzerland and the United States; and Carolina Caliento de Abreu (Brazil, 1982), who undertook the residencies Rapaces, at Instituto Espira La Espora, in Nicaragua (2009) and Laboratório Hotel, offered by Grupo Hóspede and the Secretariat for Culture of the State of São Paulo (2007).
Modelled after a residency promoted by Casa Tomada on an annual basis since 2009, the artwork's development process took four months. The artists were monitored by Ronaldo Entler, a researcher and professor at FAAP university; curator and critic Bernardo Mosqueira; Marcos Moraes and Ana Tavares; and Casa's in-house researchers during the period, Ana Luísa Lima and Galciani Neves. The artists have also engaged in practical and reflective activities such as a meeting with curator Lisette Lagnado, who discussed her work at the head of the 27th Biennial of São Paulo, and an observation drawing tour guided by São Paulo-based artist Carla Caffé.
The commissioned works straddle the line between painting and video, and share a certain social and political concern. In his video Inimigo invisível, Peters uses a situation of continuous tension and no resolve to criticize militaristic ethics and question the political and social transforming power of art. In As pérolas, como te escrevi, Regina Parra invites illegal Bolivian, Peruvian, Colombian, Argentinean, Congolese and Guinean immigrants living in São Paulo to read excerpts from Mundus Novus, a letter dating from 1504 in which sailor Américo Vespúcio introduces the New World to Europe. The work touches on issues such as cultural belonging and national identity.
The tryptic (índice 1, contiguidade não imediata), by Paulo Nimer Pjota, integrates a research on the city and the unusual relationship it promotes between prosaic and referential images of art history. The screen is thought out as a space of continuous insertion and recording of processes of creation and coexistence. In the painting/collage Em cima da hora [série/series], by Carolina Caliento, fleeting photographs and visual quotations of historical paintings create landscapes in which the perspective chaos and visual violence are a metaphor for reality in the big cities.
The artwork will be featured in the Southern Panoramas exhibition, due at SESC Belenzinho, in São Paulo, starting on September 30th.
The 17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil is an undertaking of Associação Cultural Videobrasil (www.videobrasil.org.br) and SESC São Paulo (www.sescsp.org.br).
17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil
SESC Belenzinho
SESC Pompeia
Pinacoteca do Estado (São Paulo State Art Gallery)
September 2011-January 2012
São Paulo, Brazil
