Germano Dushá, Thiago de Paula Souza and Ariana Nuala, who form the curatorial team of the 38th Panorama of Brazilian Art - Thousand Degrees. Photo: Bruno Leão/Estúdio em Obra
Germano Dushá, Thiago de Paula Souza and Ariana Nuala, who form the curatorial team of the 38th Panorama of Brazilian Art - Thousand Degrees. Photo: Bruno Leão/Estúdio em Obra

À front of the curatorship of the 38th Panorama of Brazilian Art, Germano Dushá, Thiago de Paula Souza and Ariana Nuala wanted to avoid, in the selection of their 34 participants, what they consider a trap posed by the word panorama, an impossible totalizing perspective of national artistic production.

“We have a huge generational range, with artists from 16 states, living in different contexts, developing very different practices and research. Even so, we know that it is a provisional portrait, taken by our vision”, ponders Dushá. “It’s something very small compared to the size of a continental country, so complex, with infinite cultures, that we call Brazil.”

The exhibition will take place between October 5, 2024 and January 26, 2025. Due to renovation work on the Ibirapuera Park marquee, Panorama will not be housed by the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, as usual, but by Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP).

With the title XNUMXº [A thousand degrees], a colloquial expression that suggests the idea of ​​intensity, the exhibition will explore artistic experiments “marked by heat” and which have transmutation as an “inevitable” destiny. For Thiago de Paula Souza, this is a “broad curatorial notion”.

“We look at the spiritual and ecological dimensions of artistic practice, pro tesion and eroticism of the flows of bodies, through cities, whether they are human or not, and finally how technology has contributed to the creation of political and social imaginaries”, it says. “From there, after months of research, we came up with a list of people who we believe work at the intersection of these ideas.”

Dushá states that, as the ideas around curation were consolidated, names came to light whose practices are not necessarily seen as artistic, such as Tropa do Gurilouko (RJ), a group that wears Bate-bola costumes (or Clóvis), a classic character from Rio's carnival, “who somewhat summarizes an important aspect of this energy that we are talking about”, he says. “It was an unusual and heterodox decision to invite a group that comes here with contemporary thinking and not in the spirit of a sociological, ethnographic exhibition, that wants to do a colder mapping”.

The production of Bahian visual artists Rebeca Carapiá and José Adário dos Santos would also be exemplary of the approach proposed by the curators. Ariana remembers that both work on the materiality of iron in their creations, but their works have different starting points. Adário uses hardware to make “settlements” of orixás, that is, the consecration of objects as representations of Candomblé deities; while Rebeca relates to the material through metallurgy.

“Iron shows these artists the paths they can follow, something that contradicts the idea that materials have no agency”, argues Ariana. “They are poetic in the opposite direction, but they meet each other”.

Zahy Guajajara, Ureipy. Photo: Philipp Lavra | Adriano Amaral, Untitled. Photo: Lewis Ronald
Zahy Guajajara, Ureipy. Photo: Philipp Lavra | Adriano Amaral, Untitled. Photo: Lewis Ronald

There are also artists who deal with the earth or “with the magic that comes from the earth, the soil, the clay”, in the words of Dushá, such as veteran Maria Lira Marques (MG), who develops “very fresh, new work , which has only recently gained the projection and relevance it deserves”, and also the production of young artists, who work on a “double dimension of the earth, magic, imagination and all the evocations that can come from there”, says the curator.

From a less conceptual and more formal point of view, say the curators, there was a preference for artists who are alive and active, who had never participated in the São Paulo Biennial or one of the editions of Panorama, says Dushá. The selection is marked by a considerable age range. The list, highlights the curator, also helps to trace a temporal arc, in which one questions and observes “what the people who came before laid the foundation for those who are working today”.

For Ariana Nuala, “different ages bring different densities” to Panorama, so that the practices of names such as Dona Romana (TO), “a spiritual leader who does not consider herself an artist”, Mestre Nado (PE) and Ivan Campos (AC), born in the 1940s, will be in dialogue with young people, such as Melissa de Oliveira (RJ), Marcus Deusdedit (MG) and Rafaela Kennedy (AM), complementing each other, according to the curator.

“This chronological mess, which blurs borders, interests us a lot and has everything to do with the very concept we are working on, of an absolute temperature that is imposed on everyone”, argues Dushá. “Each person comes to understand the ways of responding and transforming and transmuting themselves based on these environmental conditions that can also be poetic, metaphysical, spiritual”.

In its selection, the curatorial team also considered artists who dealt, from a thematic or formal point of view, with urban flows and the idea of ​​a 21st century Brazil “as a producer of technology, of a technology that does not necessarily involve Eurocentric visions and North Americans.” Another discussion that permeates the work of the participants is an “expanded ecological vision”, according to Dushá.

“A perspective that concerns total connectivity, sharing this environment in which we communicate and live together. And this goes beyond the false dichotomies that guided human thought from romanticism to modernity, culture versus nature, man and the environment, the organic and the artificial. It’s much more of a mix than separate things,” he explains.

Also on the list of Panorama participants are the artists Adriano Amaral (SP), Advânio Lessa (MG), Ana Clara Tito (RJ), Antonio Tarsis (BA), Davi Pontes (RJ), Frederico Filippi (SP), Gabriel Massan ( RJ), Ivan Campos (AC), Jayme Fygura (BA), Jonas Van & Juno B. (CE), Joseca Mokahesi Yanomami (RR), Labō (PA) & Rafaela Kennedy (AM), Laís Amaral (RJ), Lucas Arruda (SP), Marina Woisky (SP), Marlene Costa de Almeida (PB), Melissa de Oliveira (RJ), MEXA (SP), Noara Quintana (SC), Paulo Nimer Pjota (SP), Paulo Pires (MT), Rafael RG (SP), Rop Cateh – Soul painted in Terra de Encantaria by Akroá Gamella (MA) – in collaboration with Gê Viana (MA) and Thiago Martins de Melo (MA) –, Sallisa Rosa (GO), Solange Pessoa (MG ), Zahy Tentehar (MA) and Zimar (MA).


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