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)

Wednesday, 26 January 2011

Tuesday, 25 January 2011

Faça você mesmo: Território liberdade

  • Antonio Dias (Brazil) - 29ª Bienal de São Paulo
  • "By building connections between diverse semantic chains, the work of Antonio Dias evinces what lies in between; what resides in the interstices of precise fields of meaning, and what springs from places hitherto considered watertight. This place of sundry possibilities is handled in propositional form in Faça você mesmo: Território liberdade, a diagram drawn on the floor, suggesting the existence of some symbolic space of experimentation and invention." (From 29ª Bienal)

Saturday, 22 January 2011

No. 12

  • Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (Iran) - 29ª Bienal de São Paulo
  • "Monir Farmanfarmaian devices sculptures, designs and paintings with intricate and rigorous, yet light geometric structures. Since the 1960s, the artist has used the reverse-glass painting technique, the result of which is seen through the smooth side of the glass.[]Her paintings presented at the Bienal made from the intersection of two circles, which comprise various geometric forms, from the triangle to the undecagon, furnishing somber colors and a wealth of detail in mirrored surfaces. The circles communicate between themselves, forming diptyches that revisit the formal and symbolic tradition of Islam. The set forms a delicate sequence of layers of color, interlacing ancestral symbols from the artist's culture and religion in a codified play of tributes and deflections." (From: 29ª Bienal)

Thursday, 20 January 2011

Inferninho

  • Luiz Zerbini (Brazil) - 29ª Bienal de São Paulo
  • "Inferninho is a closed environment the exterior of which is covered in reflective black paint. Inside, a glittery mesh registers the presence of the visitor in colorful, unstable reflections, while the noise emitted by the changeable digital image, amplified by the artist, provides the sound." (From: 29ª Bienal)