Text by head curator 2019
Imagined Communities
In December 2017, the World Trade Organization, meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina, issued a statement criticizing the “trend to reject the foreign, the imported, reject the global,” seen in the trade policy of the US and other WTO member countries. In April 2018, Palestinians staged a major demonstration against the 70th anniversary of Israel and the Nakba, while Italy, England, and other European countries have witnessed the revival of movements laying claim to the continent’s fascist heritage. On all sides and from different shades of the political spectrum, nationalism has reemerged as a critical theme to understand the disputes that shape our time, raising questions about the duration and scope of this new regressive cycle.
In this context, the 21st Contemporary Art Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil | Imagined Communities borrows the title of Benedict Anderson’s classic study of the rise of nationalism to investigate how poetics stemming from the South have been addressing the phenomenon. Our interest, however, is not limited to imagined communities related to nation-states and the resurgence of nationalism. Going beyond Anderson’s conception, it is fitting to consider also other communities, created by imaginations distinct from those that founded national states.
By establishing a common ground for all community imaginations, the curatorial statement of the 21st Biennial momentarily relativizes the antinomies that have so far guided and supported the Festival’s past editions for the sake of a broader imagination exercise. Just as Pier Paolo Pasolini conceived a transnational Third World, beginning in the outskirts of Rome and extending to the countries then included in that category, we can add here communities that exist on the fringes of nation-states or in their breaches. We consider, therefore, communities of original peoples, organized without or against a state; multispecies communities, as imagined by Amerindian perspectivism; religious or mystical communities, conceived from transcendent understandings of existence; communities divided by borders drawn by colonialism or uprooted from their original lands for some reason; fictional, utopian, or clandestine communities that generate minority political practices, or those constituted in the subterranean universes of sexual experiences and dissident, counter-hegemonic, or non-Western bodies.
In his book, Anderson notes that “nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time.” Given this assertion, one must ask how symbolizations operate on the fringes of this “universally legitimate value” produced by national identities. If the South goes about investigating the symbolic production of the fringes of the hegemonic discourses of power, where are the poetics stemming from the fringe of the fringe located? What center of power serves them as model? Do they aspire to reach it, like some of those from the South? Do they base themselves on any history (of art?), do they conceive forms of distinction? In the name of what do these men and women continue to symbolize, despite everything? What languages and what idioms does the imagination of these stateless communities mobilize? Without abandoning the panoramic ambition of the event or its usual geopolitical focus, this edition intends to expand the repertoire of questions that guide our work in order to broaden the diversity of the voices we hear.
Curator's text Solange Farkas, 2019
Biennials of Urgency
Under a new name, the 21st Contemporary Art Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil honors a long history of strategic shifts and changes of course: the decision to internationalize our main show in 1990; to train our focus on the global South in 1994; and to open up to all artistic languages in 2011. Once again, Videobrasil asserts its permeable nature, sensitive to the times, a living organism, constantly evolving, periodically allowing itself to shed old skin in order to better pursue experiences that set it more clearly en route to greet the new.
The new name does more than just anoint a periodicity. It reflects the perception that our structural logic, our investigative practice, and our curatorial aspirations are taking us beyond the remit of the multicultural festival into the role played today by international art biennials. Especially those that, over the last decade or so, have helped draft a more instigating and diverse panorama of global output by lending visibility to artists and projects that attract little appreciation and/or hail from regions that are less represented on the international scene.
Whether large, like Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, which, in only ten years, has eked out a space that puts it on a par with the major European biennials, small or medium-sized, such as Cuenca and Dak’Art, or iconic, albeit struggling with enormous difficulties, like Havana, many such events share the desire to showcase what is most vigorous in local or regional production and, at the same time, help redress the sidelining of a considerable parcel of today’s contemporary art being created off the wellfunded, well-mapped, and consolidated artistic grid.
Running counter to the spectacular, superlative biennials whose choices betray, increasingly blatantly, their lack of independence from—if not outright collusion with—the art system and market, these shows emerge from plural curatorial perspectives that are edgy and willing to take risks. Their ambition is not always to have an impact beyond their home territory, but rather to restore art to where it has relevance, namely, to a critical, restless, worldcreating dimension.
There is, therefore, a pragmatic aspect to our name change, insofar as it aligns us more fully with our peers around the world: institutions and events that, like us, work to build and strengthen a parallel circuit for art produced in regions that are usually overlooked. And which, without dodging the pressing questions of our time, choose to favor curatorial projects, manifestations, and reflections that have something relevant to add to art and its role in a context of economic crisis and political retrocession.
The desire to map artistic production in regions with a colonial past in the so-called global South—in order to reveal research that has still not been shown and artists about whom not nearly enough has been said—remains our driving force as a Biennial. In order to do that, we have maintained the mechanism that has served us so well: the open call. It’s the only way we can ensure equal opportunities for those off the customary circuits and who, lacking the rubber stamp of the art market and its gatekeeper critics, are potential revelations in their fields.
Up until now, the curatorial fronts that structured our exhibitions have always emerged out of the body of selected works. That principle is maintained in this edition, but with one crucial difference: for the first time, we have suggested a guiding theme to the participants right from the open call. The chosen theme, Imagined Communities, pits itself against the hackneyed nationalisms we see resurge today and suggests a utopia of a world rebuilt out of new networks and collectivities based on identities, emotional bonds, and affinities.
Derived from the homonymous essay by Benedict Anderson, the concept was a contribution of the researcher and curator Gabriel Bogossian, who also played a decisive role in the transformations put in place in the present edition, but under study since the previous one. Assistant curator of the Associação Cultural Videobrasil since 2017, Bogossian integrates, with the guests Luisa Duarte and Miguel Angel López, the curatorial team of this Biennial. Each of whom brought to the process the benefit of research that reinforces “places of speech,” broadens themes for reflection, and deepens our curatorial proposal. Bogossian focuses on the visual representation of Brazilian indigenous peoples; Lopez, on South American and Caribbean production and the interconnectedness of dissident bodies on the contemporary art scene; and Luisa Duarte, on the political dimension of Brazilian artistic expression seen from a present and historical perspective.
In the wake of the recent Brazilian elections, it has become more urgent than ever for us to question which communities, not just imagined or supposed, can still be brought to bear in our daily lives. Prime targets for the incumbents, women and the LGBTQI+[1], black and indigenous movements and other minority groups steel their community practices in response, bracing themselves to defend so recently hard-won rights. Rather than superpose and blend into one another, these possible communities seem to have taken on more clearly drawn contours and adopted more rigid rules of belonging.
Exploring the paths set down its curatorial project, the 21st Contemporary Art Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil reaffirms its position in favor of these minority communities, bringing their artistic production and fight for their rights into the spotlight. As such, in addition to the actions we usually roll out through our international network of partner institutions, in order to reinforce and buttress the call in regions with little capillarity and fragmented circuits, for this edition we made a particular effort to reach out to specific segments.
The idea was, for example, to guarantee space for artists who are only ever included in thematic collective contemporary art shows, as if they somehow belonged to another breed of artist. Sometimes dressed up as deference, this sort of erasure affects artists from indigenous ethnicities and/or native peoples. To ensure that our call reached them, we were able to enlist the help of organizations that are references in relating to indigenous tribes, such as Instituto Socioambiental, or in fostering their audiovisual production, such as Vincent Carelli’s Vídeo nas Aldeias [Video in the Villages]. On the international level, we got in touch with agencies that support the cultural production of native peoples across Europe, Canada, Australia, the USA, and New Zealand.
Two thousand artists from 105 countries answered the open call for submissions to the 21st Biennial. The exhaustive analysis and selection process did not just consider proposals submitted specifically to the event, but also the portfolio of each artist who registered. In order to create a representative outline of the main concerns and practices revealed by the set of works, the curators and I rely on the collaboration of the Bahiabased Uruguayan Alejandra Muñoz and the Brazilians Juliana Gontijo and Raphael Fonseca, curators, critics and professors who travel through fields such as art history, architecture and education.
To amplify the pressing questions posed by the selected works, we added the contributions of five other artists, the first two of which were Biennial commissions: Rosana Paulino, who, on her first foray into video, broaches issues of black memory, ancestral ties, and identity; Thierry Oussou, from Benin, who explores the incendiary presence of colonial memory; Andrea Tonacci, a pioneer in audiovisual militancy in favor of Brazilian indigenous ethnicities; Mexican Teresa Margolles, who deals with the violence of social experience in Latin American countries, especially against women; and the Syrian photographer Hrair Sarkissian, whose pictures focus on the fate of refugees and the politically persecuted. Chosen on poetic grounds and for their representative flavor, these artists add enormously powerful artworks to the debate on ancestral belonging, decolonization, indigenous communities, negritude, and State violence.
I share with the three curators the responsibility for selecting the contents of the three platforms that comprise the 21st Biennial: the exhibition segment, which, for the first time, gathers together in one and the same space selected and guest artists and collectives, fifty-five in all, from twenty-eight countries across Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East; the public programs, which will run through to January 2020, featuring Brazilian and foreign thinkers and researchers delving into themes suggested and raised by the Biennial’s body of work, as well as performances and encounters with artists; and two publications, including this catalogue and a compilation of essays intended to prolong and reverberate the main reflections stirred by this encounter.
Lastly, but most importantly, I must stress the female presence here, which is deliberately striking, across every sphere of creation and decision-making behind the 21st Contemporary Art Biennial. In 2019, the residency, acquisition, and cash prizes offered by the Biennial will be awarded by an all-women jury comprised by Alexia Tala, curator-general of the Arte Paiz Biennial in Guatemala; the South African independent curator Gabi Ngcobo; the artist Rosângela Rennó; the art historian Reem Fadda, curator of the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism; and the Portuguese academic Marta Mestre, who taught at the Parque Lage Visual Arts School in Rio de Janeiro and currently lectures the history of non-Western art at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
Amidst the constantly renewed threats hanging over so many fundamental freedoms and values, it is a balm to be able to reaffirm and praise diversity, transformative thought, and the exercise of culture. In this sense, we are more grateful than ever to Sesc São Paulo, whose partnership makes it possible for us to bring to fruition our project for the inclusion of relevant artists and necessary research on a circuit of visibility and exchange. We are proud to be a part of the generous and contemporary project of sociocultural formation the institution has pursued with such steadfast commitment over the last few decades.
For the first time, we occupy the iconic Sesc 24 de Maio building, a veritable oasis of leisure and culture for the surrounding population, including a significant contingent of refugees. There could be no more fitting venue for a Biennial that aims to explore the artistic repercussions of the nationalist wave sweeping across the world today and the backward-sliding cycle it has triggered, a Biennial that is open to Stateless, nation-less communities, bound by ties of origin and mysticism, migrations, and dissidences.
[1] Initialism that stands for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transvestites, transsexuals, transgender, queer, intersex and asexuals, among other identifications.
ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. 21st Contemporary Art Biennial Sesc_Videobrasill. From October 9, 2019 to February 2, 2020. p. 38-40. São Paulo, SP, 2019.
Text by host institution Danilo Santos de Miranda, 2019
Other Communities
The Nation-State is an idea that determines the way a country is governed. It is a notion that leads the
population to believe that it belongs to a cohesive community with a shared language, culture, and history that all too often eclipse minority traditions. This same State rallies its people behind a certain national identity derived from symbolic practices designed to instill values and ways of life while forging continuity out of a supposedly shared past.
If, on the one hand, capitalism fostered the formation of the Nation-State, on the other, it reshaped and recast it according to its interests. With the proliferation of the global free market, the sovereignty that defined the Nation-State has been shaken to its core. Capital dynamics has relativized national borders, with constant, massive flows of goods, people, and ideas spreading the mercantile logic around the globe, imposing its criteria of optimization, quantification, productivity, and profitability.
However, while nations see their borders blurred by financial and market impediments, xenophobic nationalisms have resurged the world over. One of the symptoms of this is a growing rejection of the foreign, a phenomenon intensified by present-day migratory shifts, themselves triggered by unfettered capitalist production and accumulation, and the conflicts they generate. Faced with the dilemma, the consequences of which are proving utterly catastrophic, we are invited to rethink the pertinence of organizing Statehood around nationalist values.
Sensitive to these problems, the art field emerges as a hotbed out of which to conjure new ways of building communities, based on identifications and processes above and beyond those of the nation, bearing in mind the injustice and debt nations carry at their core, especially regarding what the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro called the “involuntários da pátria” [involuntary nationals]. It is from this fraught historical conjuncture that the 21st Contemporary Art Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil draws its curatorial tone.
Imagined Communities gathers together artistic experiences eager to embrace the communal, and new social bonds based on non-hegemonic aspects and commitments. As a sociocultural institution compelled to imagine possibilities, it is Sesc’s duty to resonate and gauge plural perspectives, so as to contribute to the process of reassessing and reinventing our place in the world.
ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. 21st Contemporary Art Biennial Sesc_Videobrasill. From October 9, 2019 to February 2, 2020. p. 34. São Paulo, SP, 2019.