Associação Cultural Videobrasil

In keeping with its experimental, innovation-oriented profile, for the first time ever the Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil has issued an open call for projects to be commissioned and featured in its upcoming edition. At this time, Associação Cultural Videobrasil and Sesc São Paulo, the partners in holding the event, announce the artists selected from among 446 project entries by artists from 71 countries: 

The South and its myriad issues – such as diasporas, hybrid identities, migration flows and travels, memories and first-person accounts, the social fabric, and insularity – has inspired and provided the parameters for the committee to select artists for this edition, as well as the curatorial guidelines for all of Festival exhibitions, public programs and publications. In addition to featuring the outcomes of art projects, the 19^th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil: Southern Panoramas will showcase artworks selected through an open call, Videobrasil Collection pieces and works by guest artists that are soon to be announced.

The selected artists will work on their projects with oversight from the committee, which is comprised of the curators Bernardo de Souza (Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil/lives and works in Rio de Janeiro), Bitu Cassundé (Ceará, Brazil/lives and works in Fortaleza), João Laia (Lisbon, Portugal/lives and works in London) and Júlia Rebouças (Sergipe, Brazil/lives and works in Belo Horizonte) – working under the guidance of the Festival’s general curator Solange Farkas. This initiative extends the curators’ involvement beyond the actual selection, engaging them in direct, continuous dialogue with the artists in developing their creative processes, in an extended time relationship.

About the selected projects

Carlos Monroy will work on “Llorando se foi” O Museu da Lambada. In memoriam de Francisco “Chico” Oliveira, a cross-referencing of two phenomena from 1980s Brazil: the lambada craze and its incidence upon the construction of national identity, and the advent and upsurge of Bolivian immigration to São Paulo. Superquadra-saci, a film by Cristiano Lenhardt, combines native Brazilian roots and the “city-landscape,” the urban setting, with throwbacks to national modernism. Mitumba, by Keli-Safia Maksud, looks into the connection between the history of soap in Victorian-era England and African fabrics in the Netherlands. The artist discusses the image of racial hygiene that was marketed in soap adverts and takes on African identity through the textiles known globally as an authentic expression of Africa, even though they are made in the Netherlands since 1846. Finally, the 19^th Festival will feature Ting-Ting Cheng’s project The Atlas of places that do not exist. The piece is a library of roughly 720 books about places that don’t exist – politically, socially, geographically or philosophically –, an exploration of the notion of existence and visibility, a questioning of the boundaries between nations and the definitions of reality.

Check out the 53 artists participating in the 19th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil: Southern Panoramas selected from the ARTWORKS call for entries.