Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Throughout her career, Fernanda Goulart seems to delve ever deeper into the themes and practices most often featured in her work: the body, intimacy, the female universe, ways of occupying space, the appropriation of artistic images, the three-dimensionalization of graphic images. Holder of a degree in visual arts from the School of Fine Arts, and of a master's degree in social communication from the School of Philosophy, Sciences, and Letters, both at UFMG, Goulart investigates modes of occupying space and of giving new dimensions to graphic elements ever since her first exhibition, Carne de segunda (2000), at Centro Cultural UFMG. In the (In)verso installation, plots of images taken from the art realm are superimposed onto words scattered on the floor and walls of the exhibition site. 

Two years later she had her first solo exhibition, Nada que você não queira (2002), at the gallery of Espaço Cultural Cemig, Belo Horizonte. It consisted of a labyrinth of billboards, bright stickers, paper plots (with life-size images culled from Vermeer's classic paintings), phrases in vynil stickers, and a wooden silhouette with hinges. The exhibition made advances in the research on the expansion of graphics in space. Inside, visitors were confronted with both their own images and Vermeer's pictures. The occupation of the exhibition site and the signification modes derived from the confrontation between visitors and the images they pass along the way widen the meanings of the artwork and deepen the artist's research.

In that same year, Goulart won the first prize at the 8th Salão Victor Meirelles, Florianópolis, for her action artwork Para entender a arte (os mais importantes quadros do mundo analisados e minuciosamente explicados). It consisted of a digital plot of a Renaissance painting, juxtaposed with sticker phrases ironizing the art circuit and the usual forms of sponsorship and cultural support. The work was submitted under the “Anonymous” pseudonym; in the “curriculum” field of the entry form, the author wrote: “Anonymous has been in a few exhibitions, but doesn't think this should interfere with the judgment of the work presented.” The nonperformance was taken to extreme consequences: the author abstained from manifesting herself even after her work was selected by the jury to receive the first prize at the Salão. 

After the declaration of political principles, there came the discovery of audiovisual and the plasticity of electronic image. Derived from the installation of the same name, Alugo-me (2004) continues, already within this new field, with the artist's formal and conceptual research. Her inquiries on the appropriation of space and the three-dimensionalization of images gained motion. Selected for the New Vectors exhibition at the 15th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival (2005), the work goes through empty houses for rent, to the sound of popular radio shows for lonely people seeking love relationships. 

The installation that contained the original artwork consisted of a small video monitor and a photograph. The deliberately low audio was only audible to those who came close to the monitor-making people feel as if they were using a small, battery-operated radio, of the type that one had to press to one's ear in order to listen to. Either shown in a loop, as was the case with the installation, or as a single channel presentation, the effect of the video is the same: it bares the uncomfortable metaphor that relates the emptiness of houses for rent to the emptiness of hearts putting themselves up as candidates to the next tenant.

The emptiness and loneliness in Alugo-me were potentialized in the following work, Quem escuta o meu sim (2005). The artist returned to the audiovisual realm to recreate intimacy once again, this time using images of memories to build up a chronology of sorts comprised of childhood, marriage, and separation. The work is a video installation consisting of three monitors, framed and built into a fake, wallpaper-covered wall. The first monitor features old Super-8 images of children playing, on and on. The second one shows a wedding scene as the bride utters a strange vow, its letters superimposed over the image: “Perhaps I already lived in some borrowed body, waiting just for you to put my pieces together.” On the third monitor, images culled from an edition of the Big Brother Brasil reality show feature a contestant who, in a desperate moment of loneliness, embraces an armless, man-shaped doll. 

The work speaks of love, memory, family relationships-and attests to the poignancy typical of the phase in Goulart's work that Alugo-me inaugurated.