Group Exhibition

conceder às constelações que nos habitam o direito de sonhar em liberdade

ANA NEVES, AMANDA FAHUR, CAROLINE RICCA LEE, FLAVIA VENTURA, GUILHERME CALLEGARI, IAH’RA E JULIANA DOS SANTOS

 

There are several themes that take shape in the territory of the body. In 1947, Antonin Artaud presented his manifesto ‘To end God’s judgement’. In it, the playwright declared a metaphorical war on organs. In his preaching, what Artaud was really suggesting was the birth of a new body, one that was capable of fully experiencing life itself. In his words, organs represented functionality, purpose and meaning. A new body that is unable to perceive the boundaries between inside and outside. In this respect, what Artaud meant was that, in his view, a body without organs would be a body in full expansion.

 

Almost half a century later, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari took up Artaud’s initial ideas in their book A Thousand Plateaus. In it, the authors argue that multiplicity is inherent to reality itself, explaining that the body is not just an organism, the body is, at the same time, a body without organs: without organs not in a concrete way, like a body without a heart or a brain, but in the sense of being unorganised. The body without organs are the multiplicities; the practices that disorganise the organism and the possible experimentations of a body that wants to exist in the world without a formal delimitation on standards imposed by a limiting society.

 

Reflecting on these other possibilities for thinking about the body is one of the pillars that guides this exhibition. While preserving the individuality of each work and artistic research, in common, the works gathered here by Ana Neves, Amanda Fahur, Caroline Ricca Lee, Flávia Ventura, Guilherme Callegari, iah’ra and Juliana dos Santos intend knowledge, ways of thinking and acting, since the discourses established by the artists affect and dispute the ways in which subjectivities are configured from a body in transformation.

 

Starting with the work of Guilherme Callegari, although his paintings are in dialogue with formalism, exploring issues of spatiality, light and geometry, there is a very strong subjective implication of the body. Firstly, because in this new phase of his pictorial research, the artist abandons large formats, bringing a dimension of intimacy to his paintings, causing his body to create a new relationship with artistic endeavour, so that this gesture causes a reflection in the viewer: instead of distance, we now experience proximity. In another, more subjective aspect, Callegari’s painting undergoes a transformation, as his body begins to experience other ways of feeling the world, in a more intuitive and spiritualised way, and this leads to a search for a kind of rational rupture, giving rise to thinking about representation in an abstract way.

 

In order to think about the work of Ana Neves, iah’ra and Juliana dos Santos, I would add to this discussion the thoughts of Denise Ferreira da Silva and her concept of Corpus Infinitum, in which the philosopher says that all existences – human, non-human and more than human – are ethically implicated, in other words, all things are interconnected. By moving between drawing, painting and literature, Ana Neves seeks, through hybrid bodies (human-fauna, human-flora, human-object), to highlight the sharing of the whole world that we are: perishable and migratory. By creating these fables about this body that dwells between the fields of figuration and abstraction, between territory and the search for belonging, the artist highlights the uncertainties inherent in this process of recognition, both internal and external.

 

In the case of iah’ra, the group of textile sculptures that are part of the exhibition are based on a physics phenomenon called solitons, or solitary waves, in which a wave propagates in a stable way without ever losing its original shape. This interaction between these soft bodies and space articulates an analogy between geometric elements and perception to connect the self and the world, demonstrating that this interaction is an infinite exchange, tensioning the notions of identity, individuality, collectivity and existence from a body that no longer wants to be read from a single idea about itself.

 

In my meeting with Juliana dos Santos, a question that the artist raised resonates to this day: what is the limit of the body? and this question has guided both my relationship with the works of the other artists taking part in the exhibition, as well as Juliana’s own set of works chosen for the show. Blue is the colour that Juliana dos Santos has dedicated herself to understanding. For years she has been creating paintings with the clitoria ternatea flower. Her works have taken on scales that involve us in such a way that the body begins to vibrate in other ways, expanding the concept of colour into fields such as: the social, the political, the imagetic, the textual and the sonorous. In the works presented here, the paintings take on another context that challenges the limits of the surface itself. In a very listening relationship with the compositions formed, Juliana breaks with this idea of the painting frame, thinking exactly about this limit of a body. By bringing new ways of thinking about a standard field, these hybrid figures that are created from this gesture make us think that a body is much more than lines and contours. Moulding oneself here is not about fitting in, but about expanding one’s own concepts about oneself.

 

If on the one hand Juliana is showing us processes of expansion from a subjective body, Amanda Fahur starts from the objectivity of her own body to expand concepts about it. When a body collapses, what are the ways of regenerating and strengthening it? These are some of the questions the artist tries to answer in some of her paintings. In a dreamlike, almost surreal way, Amanda points out ways to understand the mechanisms of a body that is affected daily by external factors and how these implications affect an entire established system. The answers to healing are multiple, but Amanda opts for a poetic path of reordering the fragments in search of a totality.

 

The body in a state of reorganisation are also concepts that permeate the research of Caroline Ricca Lee and Flávia Ventura. For Ricca Lee, the body assumes a place of memories, where the artist interweaves her existence with diasporic ancestral archives, creating fictions to compose existences that are created from payments, whether historical or generational. From decolonial and queer feminist perspectives, the assemblages created by Ricca Lee take on a character of overlapping, not only of languages, but precisely of these transits that constitute her existence, assuming that, above all, the body is also territory.

 

The notions of body-territory also permeate Flávia Ventura’s work. In her research, the artist investigates the body as a mutable device for sensitive experimentation. In her new series of encaustic works, as Flávia begins to experiment with new configurations for her own body, the painting gives up figuration to find in abstraction a space for non-response. In this way, the artist proposes a shift in the discourse on protagonism and power relations regarding gender, sexuality and aspects of identity.

 

In Walter Benjamin’s dialectic, ‘the image is the moment when what was joins what is in a flash, thus forming a constellation’. If for the philosopher image is a concept in suspension, in this exhibition the body emerges as a power from the various searches for freedom experienced by the artists, questioning – rather than answering – how these practices can enter the space of society.

 

Carollina Lauriano

curator