Associação Cultural Videobrasil

In Shows in Context, a meeting held this Thursday (1.30at 8 pm at the Sesc Pompeia Warehouse, the curators Ana Maria Maia and Daniela Labra spoke on the relationship between the Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil shows and the exhibits featured in the country throughout the last three decades, highlighting the period in the 1970s and 80s when video was left out of the country’s mainstream art circuits. The meeting is a part of the last focus of the 18^th Festival’s Public Programs, featuring up until next Sunday, February 2 at Sesc Pompeia. On Saturday (1.01), at 4 pm, the Festival’s meetings program closes in style with a debate featuring Solange Farkas, Moacir dos Anjos, Gabriel Priolli Neto and Eduardo de Jesus, with mediation from Teté Martinho.

At this Thursday’s meeting, featuring Ana Maria Maia, Daniela Labra and mediated by the researcher Ana Pato, the two guests prepared presentations based on their first-hand experience as curators and researchers in the field. While Ana Maria Maia introduced her research on a methodology to cover a field that is still new in Brazil, the history of exhibits, Daniela Lebra addressed aspects of Brazilian representation outside Brazil, the theme of her academic research work.    

According to Ana Pato, the two participants’ discourses are crucial not only to Videobrasil, at a time when it seeks to value its own history, narrated in the 30 Years show, but also to the context of the history of exhibits in Brazil. To her, in a way, both the retrospective show of the country’s first festival ever to embrace video productions, and the two guests’ lines of research attest to the fact that Brazil is beginning to recount its own history as pertains to contemporary art production. “By hosting these debates and the exhibit, which spans the Festival’s entire trajectory, Videobrasil is also helping to foster the study of the history of exhibits in our country,” she says.

To Daniela Labra, who studies the representation of Brazilian art production abroad, the whole expectation surrounding Brazilian art needs to cool off. According to the researcher, there is also a vast diversity in art production around the world, and therefore it would be impossible for us to grasp the entirety of modern and contemporary production of the United States, for instance.

To Ana Maria Maia, “exhibits become an object of study in order for a national history of art to be established.” The curator, who discussed “possible tensions between exhibits and histories,” investigating possible narratives, inquired: “How can one find paths to representing the all-too-modern history of art?” She believes that to eternalize the history of art in its entirety, spanning the contexts of each time, audience subjectivities, and the public sphere, “where political divergences and different technical tools clash,” is a near-impossible task.

Upcoming meeting | 30 years: memories and updates

Next Saturday the 1^st, the next-to-last day of the Festival, will see the final meeting of Focus 8 of this edition’s Public Programs: In the Light of the 30 Years. In 30 years: memories and updates, Videobrasil’s founder and 18^th edition general curator, Solange Farkas, alongside the curator, researcher and coordinator of Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, Moacir dos Anjos; the professor and curator Eduardo de Jesus; and the journalist Gabriel Priolli Netto will review and discuss the main cycles of change undergone by Videobrasil, relating them to shifts in contemporary Southern art over the past three decades. The event will also take place at the Sesc Pompeia Warehouse, starting at 4 pm, with mediation from cultural journalist and Videobrasil editorial coordinator Teté Martinho.