Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Four decades after holding the first Videobrasil festival in the final years of the civil-military dictatorship that haunted Brazil, the 22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil | 40-Year Special occupied Sesc 24 de Maio between October 18, 2023 and February 25, 2024. Under the title Memory is an Editing Station, the exhibition dialogued with the event’s long trajectory, while simultaneously reflected on the present moment of the world and pointed to future paths, through the works of 60 artists from the Global South.

With artistic direction by Solange Oliveira Farkas and curated by Raphael Fonseca, from Brazil, and Renée Akitelek Mboya, from Kenya, the 22nd edition resulted of a partnership between Sesc SP and the Associação Cultural Videobrasil. Drawing on a verse by Waly Salomão, the curatorial selection presented different visions and ways of approaching memory — and forgetting — whether individual or collective, linked to varied social, political and cultural contexts. The different ideas of memory that emerge at the biennial varied not only according to the generation of the participating artists, but also according to their geographic origin and the media they used — such as video, installation, photography, performance and textiles.

The Global South represented in this edition, with artists from 38 countries in Africa, the Americas (South, Central and North), Asia, Europe (Eastern and Portugal), the Middle East and Oceania — including representatives of Indigenous peoples — also reflected the global post-pandemic context. With significant space for audiovisual languages, based on the perception of the central role that video occupies in contemporary life, the edition established a direct link with the early days of Videobrasil. It celebrated its four decades with the parallel exhibition 40-Year Special, which covers the entire history of the event and its transformations over time.

More than a major event, the 22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil was a platform that has generated knowledge and has created networks in marginalized territories on the world map of the arts. In this sense, a series of Public Programs was held throughout the event and was conceived as a space for the reverberation and amplification of ideas, conversations and propositions on themes and issues triggered by the exhibition. As a discursive beginning of the exhibition, the events brought together artists, critics, curators, filmmakers, poets, researchers, scholars and theorists, Brazilians and foreigners, meetings focused on some aspect of the curatorial theme of the biennial.

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Visual identity and graphic design | Luciana Facchini and Flávia Castanheira

Photographic record | Pedro Napolitano Prata and Ricardo Amado

Video record | Tom Butcher Cury