The artifice of superimposition
by Mariana Lorenzi
about Focus 7 of 18th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil's Public Programs
Saying a work of art is never depleted means to say it allows multiple readings and that in order to exist, it requires the eyes of agents other than the artist, like the curator, the critic, the educator and especially the audience.
The importance of this subject was a particular topic of discussion during Focus 7 of the 18th Festival Videobrasil. In “Superimposed Readings,” three curators and one artist were invited to discuss the artworks shown in the exhibitions Southern Panoramas and 30 Years. The guests were called upon to consider roughly 100 pieces by artists from the geopolitical South of the world and superimpose readings that would activate the artworks and the exhibition venue in an unconventional way.
The curator’s presence in the exhibition space usually materializes through written text, as a means to establish a tighter dialogue between the artist and the audience. In this case, the intertextual proposal, which opposes a character of authority, juxtaposing more than superimposing itself to the artwork, was particularly present in the interventions proposed by the curators Galciani Neves and Julio Martins.
For the Focus 7, curator and art critic Galciani Neves proposed an exercise in experimental exhibition design, inviting artists – some of whom were featured in the 18th Festival – to write about some of the artworks in the show. Their short texts were placed beside the exhibition labels. Thus, the curator subverted the role of text in the exhibition space, and revealed that it can complement the artworks on show, rather than merely interpret or describe them. The Superimposed Writings caused the artworks to unfold, broadening their layers of comprehension. Because they are highlighted, the texts keep echoing even outside the exhibition space.
In 4 Livros à Margem (4 Books at the Margin), curator and art historian Júlio Martins placed sketchbooks in each of the four corners of the exhibition venue, representing the cardinal points – orientation signs. The sketchbooks, as objects located at the exhibition’s boundaries, misled incautious spectators into thinking they were just another artwork among the others. Thus, it prompts us to ponder the boundaries of the exhibition and the experiences it contains, what is artwork and what is superimposition. Upon opening them, we realize the booklets converse with the Southern Panoramas show, even though Martins exposes to the audience a personal aspect of his practice, an intuitive form, rooted in his memory, of making connections between the artworks and multiple references from literature and art history.
Whereas Galciani Neves and Júlio Martins have superimposed their readings using text, Carolina Mendonça and Paulo Myiada have opted for a different type of interlocution, respectively using performance and video to attract the spectator’s gaze. Their two proposals were targeted at audience members, enticing them into stepping out of their role as observers and taking center stage in the artistic experience.
To the architect, urban planner and curator Paulo Miyada, the audience occupies a place of production of meanings and discourses within the exhibition space. To highlight this, Miyada produced a video titled Mixtape: Videobrasil, which employs artifices from documentary and fiction to follow a young couple along in their visit to the 18th Festival. The video was shown in the venue of the show 30 Years, causing viewers to identify with the situation it portrays and to take the place of both subject to be analyzed and of subject who analyzes and observes, thereby causing a superimposition of real and represented time and space.
The artist and theatrical director Carolina Mendonça adopted performance as the format of her superimposed reading. She developed a subtle action called Público (Portuguese for public or audience), featuring four performers and toying with viewers’ experiences in the exhibition venue and their relationship with the artworks. Following rules previously set by the director, the actors discreetly walked around the premises of the Southern Panoramas show, following visitors and gradually interfering with their paths and experiences. In one such intervention, a distracted spectator did not realize he was dictating the pace of the group of performers. They all stopped in front of Eneida Sanches’ Transe, deslocamento de dimensões (Trance, displacement of dimensions), in which several engravings of bull’s eyes mix with projected images and shadows, giving off the impression that artwork and spectator were observing one another. At the end of the action, the actors surrounded the visitor and recited a text by the dance historian Bojana Cevik: “It is a common vision today that when we find ourselves in public – if not before that, as we are social beings from the start – we find ourselves performing in front of others.”
The superimpositions featured in Focus 7 play with the elements and mechanisms of art, either by questioning the role of the curatorial text, displacing the spectator into the center of the artwork or activating unlikely places within the exhibition space. The new and various reading possibilities we find in these proposals lead us to understand superimposition as an artifice for the renewal of aesthetic experience.