Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Hosted at Solar do Unhão, a premium postcard location in Salvador, the Modern Art Museum of Bahia (MAM-BA) is regarded as the state’s premiere contemporary art facility, averaging at 200,000 visitors per year. The venue also maintains a regular video art program. Thus, it is a mandatory stop in marking Videobrasil On Tour’s commitment to expanding the audience for Southern Hemisphere contemporary art as much as possible.

The museum’s privileged location, by the way, makes for an interesting dialogue with Moran Shavitt’s Exploring, in which postcard images and letters exchanged by the artist and her father draw a chart of affection – a feature that likens the piece to Jan Villa, in which Natasha Mendonca, from India, portrays the impact of a natural event on a neighborhood of her city.

The landscape around the venue is also reminiscent of BRAVO-RADIO-ATLAS-VIRUS-OPERA, a video installation by Carla Zaccagnini featuring footage from a transoceanic crossing. The poetical possibilities of non-conventional image-capturing techniques are also on show in the images seen in Dirceu Maués’ Em um lugar qualquer – Outeiro.

In a way, Maués subverts the cinematic eye – a proposition that Claudia Joskowicz’s Round and Round and Consumed by Fire video and Akram Zaatari’s Tomorrow Everything Will Be Alright also bring to bear, albeit in deeply distinct ways. Like Gabriel Mascaro in his The adventures of Paulo Bruscky, Zaatari operates by reversing expectations concerning the possibilities of contemporary virtual worlds.

In his Tapetes installation, Adriano Costa creates a formal provocation that questions the very statute of art. All of the pieces tackle fundamentally social or political issues somehow – as does Liu Wei’s Unforgettable Memory, based on the Tiananmen Square Massacre’s erasure from the memory of Chinese people.

These myriad perspectives and procedures create a panorama that reveals the paths through which contemporary art from the geopolitical South enters the global scene – what is seen is a production in lively conversation w the topics, aesthetical and social problems of contemporary times, art pieces in which seemingly opposing dimensions – such as intimate versus collective, historical versus artistic –, are creatively pitted against one another.

+ Find details about featured works at the On Tour website.

+ And check out the service and visitation information at the MAM-BA website.

+ Click here to check all details about the next and last opening of the Videobrasil On Tour 2012-2013, in Colombia.

+ Pictures of the opening night.