Transregional Academies | Modernisms: Concepts, Contexts and Circulations, July 17-24 , 2016 (São Paulo) (original) (raw)
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Paths of the modern African arts in São Paulo: from São Paulo Art Biennials
SPLAS FORUM 2019 (The Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies) - University of Nottingham, 2019
Abstract The present article intends to ponder on the presence of modern African arts in the city of São Paulo, putting them into context through the critical and historical assessment of their reception and exhibition. This study approaches art exhibits as discourse creating spaces about modern African art, examining them through artistic, historical and political contexts, considering the reverberations caused across the historiography of art in Brazil. Keywords: African modernisms, Africa, São Paulo Art Biennial, Modern Art. ________________ Resumo Este artigo tem por objetivo refletir sobre a presença das artes modernas Africanas na cidade de São Paulo, contextualizando-as a partir de um ponto de vista histórico e crítico de suas recepções e exibições. O estudo toma as exposições de arte como espaços criadores de discursos sobre as artes modernas Africanas, analisando-as a partir de contextos artísticos, histórico e políticos, considerando as reverberações geradas por essas dentro da historiografia das artes no Brasil. Palavras chaves: Modernismos Africanos, África, Bienal de São Paulo, Arte Moderna.
Cultural maps, networks and flows: The history and impact of the Havana Biennale 1984 to the present
Cultural maps, networks and flows: The history and impact of the Havana Biennale 1984 to the present, 2010
Since 1984 the Havana Biennale has been known as “the Tri-continental art event,” presenting artists from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. It also has intensely debated the nature of recent and contemporary art from a Third World or Global South perspective. The Biennale is a product of Cuba’s fruition since the Revolution of 1959. The Wifredo Lam Center, created in 1983, has organized the Biennial since its inception. This dissertation proposes that at the heart of the Biennale has been an alternative cosmopolitanism (that became an existential internationalism during the “contemporary” moment) embraced by a group of local cultural agents, critics, philosophers, art historians, and also supported by a network of peers around the world. It examines the role Armando Hart Dávalos, Minister of Culture of Cuba (1976-1997), who played a key figure in the development of a solid cultural policy, one which produced the Havana Biennale as a cultural project based on an explicit “Third World” consciousness. It explores the role of critics and curators Gerardo Mosquera and Nelson Herrera Ysla, key members of the founding group of the Biennale. Subsequently, it examines how the work of Llilian Llanes, director of the Lam Center and of the Biennale (1983-1999), shaped the event in structural and conceptual terms. Finally, it examines the most recent developments and projections for the future. Using primary material, interviews, and field work research, the study focuses on the conceptual, contextual, and historical structure that supports the Biennale. It presents from several optics the views and world-view of the agents involved from the inside (curators and collaborators), as well as, from an art-world perspective through an account of the nine editions. Using the Havana Biennale as case study this work goes to disentangle and reveal the socio- political and intellectual debates taking place in the conformation of what is call today global art. In addition, recognizes the potentiality of alternative thinking and cultural subjectivity in the Global South.
Art connections: South–South transnational flow(s)
Routledge Handbook of South–South Relations. Edited by Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Patricia Daley, 2019
In: Routledge Handbook of South–South Relations. Edited by Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Patricia Daley (2019) Ch. 31. The final chapter in this part, and in the handbook, provides a further critical analysis of the role and potential of collaboration and solidarity with regard to the important flows and counter-flows of ideas, people and objects. Turning his attention to the ‘state of the arts of the global South’, Rojas-Sotelo traces cultural and artistic flows and exchanges within, across and from the global South. Echoing the histories and debates traced throughout the handbook, Rojas-Sotelo notes that ‘most of the global South . . . was transformed by modernity/coloniality, their experiences interconnected under global routes of exchange and diverse forms and processes of migration’. Against this historical backdrop, throughout which the arts of the South have simultaneously been ‘treated as primitive, uncivilized, savage and non-refined, but [also] as a source of inspiration for the Western Euro-North American art history’, and as objects to the collected, consumed and commercialised, Rojas-Sotelo examines artistic production in/from the South with a particular focus on tropicalism, hybridity and bordering. In so doing, he highlights diverse conceptualisations of the South – including Mosquera’s categorisation of ‘the issue of “Third World” or “Art of the South” not as a geographic problem but as a problem of the geography of power (Rojas Sotelo, 2009, p. 163)’ – the significance of race (and whiteness) in processes of artistic cultural production, circulation and consumption, and the development of pluriversal approaches that challenge, resist and fill gaps in existing epistemologies and ontologies, both of the North and the South. Also he highlights the extent to which ‘decentred authors from the South, have been documenting how a potent cultural trialectic took place: indigenous and black artistic expression fertilised white modernism, just as white art forms helped shape the indigenous and black modernisms in the South’. Within the context of such trialectics and other forms of interconnections and intersections, throughout his chapter Rojas-Sotelo asserts that ‘the margin is where their power resides’, while also noting, with reference to bordering, that ‘[a] mestizo/liminal and alternative culture has surfaced from the borders, fractures and crevices, creating a physical and symbolic ethos expressed in the work of the Chicana intellectual Gloria Anzaldúa (1988).’ Indeed, Rojas-Sotelo demonstrates the significance of multiple processes and directionalities of interrelatedness, whether through modes of resistance (against Northern denigration or appropriation of Southern art and artists) or collaboration (with differently positioned and situated artists and audiences). Such modes of collaboration include those showcased, created and nurtured through the Havana Bienalle which, since 1984 ‘has been known as “the Tricontinental art event,” presenting artists from Latin America, Africa and Asia, as well as Southern artists living in the North’. Indeed, as is powerfully argued by Rojas-Sotelo, and as we have aimed to demonstrate throughout the course of this handbook: The stories of the peoples of the South cannot be disentangled from those of the global North, as these stories refer to the building of nation-states and the participation of the people of the South in the economies, cultures and epistemic understanding of the world. In effect, while acknowledging the ongoing exclusion and marginalisation of Southern art and Southern ways of knowing, being and acting, Rojas-Sotelo nonetheless concludes that ‘[a]ll these prominent examples of counter-flows, subaltern, situated and localised cultural production from the South may give a hopeful picture of how the world has become more interconnected, diverse and democratic.’ Advocating for the creation of more diverse and meaningfully collaborative spaces, and for the incorporation of both aesthesis (‘the sensing and feeling in opposition to the pure formal in aesthetics’) and ‘decolonial aesthetics’, Rojas-Sotelo powerfully argues that ‘[b]y reconnecting cultural and artistic production to life itself, in relational terms, by readapting ways of living, belonging and listening to the past and present, alternative systems of governance beyond modern democracy and late capitalism are possible.’ This aim is part of the overarching project that we believe the chapters in this handbook help us better understand, and work toward.
Arts, 2019
This paper will address specifically the 24th edition of the São Paulo Biennial (1998), which took up Oswald de Andrade's concept of anthropophagy as a guiding axis, but it will also bring to light the first edition of the Mercosul Biennial, which was held in 1997 in the city of Porto Alegre, situated in the south of Brazil, with the intention of establishing itself as a space for promotion of Latin American art. Both biennials are private entities, supported by autonomous foundations, but which require public funds to carry out their shows. It is noteworthy that those two shows were held a few years after the third edition of the Havana Biennial, which is widely recognized as a landmark in the history of the biennials based on South-South dialogue. I will point out the connections between the proposals of these exhibitions as well as relate them to the Brazilian economic situation at the time and the dilemma of globalization.
Alterité et Art Contemporain : Une Étude De Deux Expositions Internationales
2012
The exhibition Magiciens de la Terre (Paris, 1989) is a landmark of a new look, in Europe, from the traditional art scene to the “art of the other”. In Brazil, in 1998,the exhibition Antropofagia , the 24th Sao Paulo Biennial, proposed a theme that articulatedthe local and the global cultures.We willtry, from the analysis of speeches announced by both exhibitions, understand the strategies carried out by the international art scene in the reproduction of a certain notion of globalization and multiculturalism in contemporary art.
The dilemmas of African diaspora in the global art discourse
2019
In this paper, I explore how the notion of African diaspora has been used as a framework for the reassessment of essentialized identity approaches in the domain of art history and curatorship, between the1980s and 2000s. For this, I examine the emergence of the concept in cultural studies and how it served as a tool for unsettling the narratives of belonging associated to nation and ethnicity. Such contextualization provides a ground for the analysis of the dilemmas introduced by a diasporic perspective in the field of African art and the local-global art discourse. Sabrina Moura* Universidade de Campinas (UNICAMP) * Sabrina Moura is a researcher and curator based in São Paulo, Brazil. She is currently a PhD Candidate at the University of Campinas. She was the guest editor of the book Southern Panoramas: Perspectives for Other Geographies of Thought (2015). She was a visiting professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (Porto Alegre, Brazil) and has been teaching art ...
The Other Network: The Havana Biennale and the Global South
The Global South, 2011
Since 1984 the Havana Biennale has been known as “the Tri-continental art event,” presenting artists from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, as well as artist living in the Northern Diasporas. It has also intensely debated the nature of contemporary art from a Third World/Global South perspective. The Biennale is a product of Cuba’s cultural policy since the Revolution of 1959. The Wifredo Lam Center, created in 1983, has organized the Biennial since its inception. This article proposes that at the heart of the Biennale has been an alternative cosmopolitanism as a sort of decolonial move (that became an existential internationalism), embraced by a group of local cultural agents, critics, philosophers, and art historians, and supported by a network of peers around the world. It examines the role Armando Hart Dávalos, Minister of Culture of Cuba (1976–1997), a key figure in the development of a solid cultural policy that put the Havana Biennale as a cultural project based on an explicit “Third World” consciousness. It explores the role of critics and curators Gerardo Mosquera, Nelson Herrera Ysla, and Llilian Llanes, director of the Lam Center and of the Biennale (1983–1999), who shaped the event in structural and conceptual terms. Finally, it examines how Third World Art has become Global. Using primary material, interviews, and field work research, the article focuses on the conceptual, contextual, and historical structure that supports the Biennale. Using the Havana Biennale as a case study, it is possible to reveal one side of the sociopolitical and intellectual debates taking place in the conformation of what is today called global art. In addition, the article recognizes the potentiality of alternative thinking and cultural subjectivity in the Global South.