Curator's text Solange Farkas, 2015

Subtly in Tune

The geopolitical commonalities that unite regions with a colonial past into a heterogeneous set with shared accents is an idea that has driven the Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil since the 1990s. The 19th Festival is entirely devoted to establish dialogue among diverse subsets of recent productions from the South. To this end, Southern Panoramas branches out into three exhibitions featuring artworks selected through an open call for entries, projects the Festival chose to commission, and pieces created by five guest artists: Abdoulaye Konaté from Mali, Sônia Gomes and Rodrigo Matheus from Brazil, Gabriel Abrantes from Portugal, and Yto Barrada from Morocco.

The exquisite complementarity between this bevy of contents stems from the work of guest curators Bernardo José de Souza, Bitu Cassundé, João Laia and Júlia Rebouças, who were entrusted with all three Festival exhibitions for first time. The commissioning of art projects, which broadens Videobrasil’s scope of action and endows its curatorial research with new meaning, as well as the launch of the first book of the Southern Panoramas | Readings series, featuring essays on the notion of art in the geopolitical South, are also relevant modifications in the structure of this Festival edition.

Additionally, the 19th Videobrasil will mark the launch of Galpão VB, a venue that will house several permanent Videobrasil Collection research and activation activities. The Festival’s exhibitions and film programs will take place at Sesc Pompeia and Galpão VB, as will activities, meetings and tools designed to activate and explore said exhibitions, including workshops, conversations, tours, online programming, and the seminar Places and meanings in art: debates from the South. The parallel show Those born for adventure don’t stray from the path, which is set to take place at Paço das Artes during the Festival, will feature a selection of Videobrasil Collection artworks that somehow reverberate the subjects at play in Southern Panoramas. The curating by Diego Matos reaffirms our policy of fostering dialogue between the collection and contemporary production.

In addition to a cohesive set of artworks, the outcome of the experiment of devoting the 19th Festival entirely to Southern production is an exciting overview of the strategies, counter- narratives and questions employed by artists – some with established careers and others less so –, often in subtle synchronism, to confront contemporary reality.

Text by host institution Danilo Santos de Miranda, 2015

Art that Instigates and Exasperates

Indifference and conformism tend to conceal a certain uneasiness caused by the multiple demands of contemporary life. One way to shake up the status quo is to promote moments of suspension and uncanniness capable of cultivating other possible forms of being in the world. These moments of suspension can be achieved in many ways, especially through the arts.

In this context, freedom of expression becomes all the more relevant insofar as it jeopardizes an entire civilizing model that is fraught with frequent crises. This idea carries, in its core, templates for an overcoming through the pursuit of new fields and opportunities, through creativity, experimentation, criticism, and reflection. On this non-polarized terrain, where nothing is predefined, what prevail are chosen and emotional bonds associated with human interaction, with the notion of transitoriness, and with a certain tendency towards improvisation and tolerance regarding error.

In dealing with subjectivities, symbolic creations coax us to draft in other interfaces and connections, harbor elements of doubt, and open a space for new questions and lines of investigation. This allows unlikely combinations to throw open doors onto horizontal dialogues and enable other network-based actions.

Since 1992, Sesc’s partnership with Associação Cultural Videobrasil has worked to promote and spread this singularity of expressions, and in so doing it has been able to count on curators, artists and researchers from different territories and cultures identified with the global South. It is an initiative that also aims to engage various publics in debates, knowledge sharing, and cultural fruition as preconditions for triggering a reflexive process in deliberate opposition to the conformism and indifference that can numb movements for social transformation.

In this context, the Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil | Southern Panoramas, now in its nineteenth edition, strengthens its educational take on issues that are central to the contemporary world, valuing the perspectives of art as key elements in building critical thinking.