Saturday 26 February 2011

Slings

  • Nnenna Okore (Australia) - 29ª Bienal de São Paulo
  •  "The basis of Nnenna Okore's work is daily life. The artist works with things she finds, from newspapers and magazines to the most varied fabrics, to which she applies different procedures, such as collage, sewing, embroidery and dyeing, deforming and remodeling them into sculptures in which the recycled material acquires new dimensions and meaning, raising questions of overproduction, surplus and waste. In Slings, the artist rolls up newspapers into scrolls, forming asymmetric organic-looking and visceral clumps, bundled into thick jute slings. Though suspended in this manner, the sculptures lie against the wall as if its smooth white surface somehow guided the reading of the works as a linear narrative. Nnenna Okore lends a whole new aura to these reading materials by depriving them of their informative function, at the same time as she engages them in a protest against excess by hanging them on exhibition walls as an installation." (From: 29ª Bienal)

Monday 21 February 2011

Inimigos

  • Gil Vicente  (Brazil) - 29ª Bienal de São Paulo
  • "The work of Gil Vicente translates a sense of uneasiness about the prevailing modes of political representation, expressing deep disillusion as to the possibility of change through formally constituted leadership and warning of a sapping of patience that has often led others to violent confrontation. In his work, Gil Vicente does not look to confuse art and crime, but rather to substitute the crime as act with the creation of its explicit image. In Inimigos, a series of life-size realist drawings in charcoal on paper, the artist assumes the role of the assassin of political leaders who, presiding over different geographic domains, hold distinct if not conflicting world views." From: 29ª Bienal

Friday 11 February 2011

Escada

  •  José Spaniol  (Brazil) - 29ª Bienal de São Paulo
  • "For the Bienal, Spaniol develops an installation that materializes in accumulative actions. In the first of these, in which he molds some beaten earth, the artist tensions the empty space of the building, constructing Escada that almost reaches the ceiling. He then takes a series of white marble dishes, thinly coated in oil paint and distributes them about the space; lastly, adjustments and rectifications can bring new objects and words to the conjunct, already replete with material and qualities. Enigmatic and difficult to quantify, the installation reverberates with imagetic and literary echoes that make up the artist's repertoire, materializing an ineffable environment. "  (From: 29ª Bienal)

Friday 4 February 2011

História do futuro

  • Milton Machado (Brazil) - 29ª Bienal de São Paulo
  • "História do futuro is a work in progress since 1978 that consists of a series of fourteen designs and a descriptive text. It reveals an absolute and hyper-coherent imaginary system that articulated the Imperfect World, Perfect World and Pluperfect World. This mythical civilization inhabited by conceptual characters, such as the Destruction Module, a machine that makes and unmakes cities; and the Nomad, a minuscule sphere that fights against the odds in order to survive in Pluperfect Cities. Begun as a project somewhere between utopia and dystopia, História do futuro was cross-dressed over time into literature, philosophy, geometry and pataphysics, the science of the imaginary solutions." (From: 29ª Bienal)