RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – There are 60 works by 55 artists from 28 nations. This year, the exhibition’s theme is “Imagined Communities”, the same title as the historian Benedict Anderson’s book on nationalism.
The aim is to reflect on community organizations beyond the States, such as traditional groups, refugees and utopian possibilities. “It responds to the desire to grasp the artistic production of stateless communities, such as indigenous, immigrant, and religious communities”.
“Every type of community that does not conform to or is not represented by a national state”, explains one of the curators, Gabriel Bogossian.
Indigenous artists
Indigenous artists’ productions are one of this edition’s features. “Indigenous production goes a long way towards confronting territorial policies, about the policies of the Brazilian State in a broader way that involves rights, such as the right to health”, comments the curator.
The struggle for rights was the driving force behind a group of indigenous people from the Javari Valley region who occupied a building in the Special Indigenous Health District (Dsei) in January 2018.
The recording of this demonstration is one of the three parts of the triptych made up of videos from the Alto Amazonas Audiovisual collective.
“Each element addresses an aspect of the contemporary indigenous experience in the Upper Javari region. A region with violent disputes and more isolated groups in Brazil today. Very rich in minerals and close to the border with Peru and Colombia, where the Brazilian State is very little present,” Bogossian details on the context of the work.
Borders also appear, tenuously, in the work “Jeguatá: Caderno de viagem”. Through photos, videos and objects, a trip of Brazilian Guarani Indians are recorded during a visit to a village of the same ethnicity in Argentina.
The curator says that the group in charge of the expedition “built a bridge between these two villages and on the way took a message from relatives who had not seen each other for many years. A kind of video letter”.
“In this work, we realize how much the indigenous world does not organize itself by borders, and the social restrictions of the non-indigenous world interfere in the social and subjective experience of the indigenous world,” Bogossian points out about the research.
Visibility
Exploring the community sense in an urban context, Jardim Miriam Arte Clube (Jamac) hangs large banners at the exhibition’s entrance depicting prominent women in the neighborhood and in Latin America’s recent history.
“The installation is an exercise in the visibility and memory of these women,” emphasizes the curatorial text. Jamac was founded in 2004 by the artist Mônica Nador, where the works are developed together with the local community.
“In a sense, we perceive all these minority communities expressing their desire for acknowledgment, for the legitimacy of their existence”, summarizes Bogossian on the point that seems to run through the vast majority of works present in the exhibition.
From an aesthetic point of view, however, the curator emphasizes that there are multiple proposals. “From the classical video, single-channel on television, to complex multichannel installations. Recent productions, productions with old material”, he enumerates.
The Videobrasil Biennial runs until February 2nd, 2020. The exhibition is open from Tuesday to Saturday, from 9 AM to 9 PM; Sundays and holidays, from 9 AM to 6 PM.
Source: Agência Brasil