17th Festival - Videobrasil

Undertaking |

Associação Cultural Videobrasil
SESC São Paulo

General Curator |

Solange Farkas

The 17th Festival marks the broadening of the project’s scope. Now called the International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil, the event becomes inclusive of other artistic experiments, such as installations, performances, artist books, photographs, and paintings, as part of the Southern Panoramas competitive show, held at SESC Belenzinho. With its new format, the Festival maintains its role as a special showcase for production from the world’s geopolitical South, featuring work by 101 artists from Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Oceania, while becoming the first contemporary art festival in the country. In keeping with this new scope, guest artist Olafur Eliasson holds his first Latin American exhibition as part of the Festival. Curated by Jochen Volz, Your body of work is featured at SESC Belenzinho, SESC Pompeia, and Pinacoteca do Estado. The show comprises 12 installations that invite the audience to experiment with their perceptions of reality.

Other Festival actions include the 1st Videobrasil Open Studio Prize, which selects young São Paulo-based artists to produce commissioned works at interaction-oriented facility Casa Tomada; and the Southern Panoramas Seminars, which discuss curatorial and editorial hypotheses, network articulations, and propositions for training within the Southern scene.

Visual identity and graphic design | Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain

Photographic record | Everton Ballardin

Video record | Marco del Fiol

Programme

competitive show

Southern Panoramas | 17th Festival

The 17^thedition consolidated the Festival’s embracing of all languages. The show was built upon 101 works shortlisted from among 1295 submissions and divided into four curated sections: Cartographies of Affection, Nature and Culture, Political Landscapes, and Optical Devices

exhibition

Olafur Eliasson - Your Body of Work

First solo show by the Icelandic-Danish artist in South America. The set of works was showcased at Sesc Pompeia, the São Paulo State Art Gallery (Pinacoteca) and Sesc Belenzinho, including early pieces and projects created specifically for São Paulo.

performance

# 4 (from the series Corpo ruído - Estudo para um soterramento), by Paula Garcia

The work contrasts the sensations of levity and weight by uniting everyday objects and scrap metal with neodymium magnets.

Arquivo banana, by Leandro Cardoso

Parodying pedagogy and the spectacle, this performance/lecture is based on an archive of the same name that consists of a collection of representations of bananas throughout the history of art, from Albert Eckhout to Andy Warhol.

Art Idol, de Aya Eliav e Ofir Feldman

The performance parodies the famous reality show American Idol, simulating the final of a program to select a new talent in performance. For the artists, it is an interactive allegory for the art system, one that criticizes its similarities with the pop industry and questions the relevance of performance as an art form on the current scene.

Bandeira de água benta / Bandeira de água comum, by Deyson Gilbert

Two flags made of ice are raised and left to melt. We know from the title of the work that one of these flags is made from normal ice and the other from frozen holy water. The performance uses this lack of distinction to question the formation of values and the very nature of symbolic determination, both in art, in the strict sense, and in culture in general.

Ponto de fuga, by Felipe Bittencourt

The performer runs toward the panel, rams his head into the cut‐out hole, and remains there for as long as his physical stamina will allow. The work is an expression of artistic activism and an exercise in scathing institutional criticism, drawing a parallel between the limits of the body and institutional and spatial boundaries.

public programs

Southern Panoramas Seminars: 4. Editorial Intentions: Who Reads and Who Writes, What For

How conceptual artists, critics, and curators use publications to promote a new artistic expression.

Meeting: "Place, Landscape, and City", with Euler Sandeville Jr.

The architect and researcher explores the idea of landscape as a “socially constructed shared experience” and addresses the multiple possibilities of human contact with nature, including the concepts of place and environment.

Meeting: "Your Body of Work", with Olafur Eliasson

The Festival’s guest artist addresses his production, which originates from a wide-ranging investigation of scientific and philosophical issues. Known for large-scale sculptures and installations such as the Weather Project (London, 2003) andThe New York City Waterfalls (New York, 2008), Eliasson is the coordinator of the Institute for Spatial Experiments, affiliated to the Berlin University of the Arts, and will have his first-ever exhibition in Latin America.

Meeting: "Your Empathic City: city, art, cinema", with Karim Aïnouz

The Brazilian filmmaker comments on his collaboration with Olafur Eliasson in the project Your Empathic City, which takes the optical phenomenon known as afterimage (the retention of images by the retina) and images of São Paulo as starting points for revealing sensorial dimensions of the city that the gaze accustomed to daily life no longer perceive.

Associação Cultural Videobrasil

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