Bernardo Mosqueira, curator and artistic director of Solar dos Abacaxis. Photo: Mason Wilson
Bernardo Mosqueira, curator and artistic director of Solar dos Abacaxis. Photo: Mason Wilson

Bernardo Mosqueira doesn't stop. O Manor of Pineapples, of which he is artistic director, announced for 18/11 the opening of the first exhibition of resident artists from his Oficina Solar, at its new address. Carioca natives Ana Bia Silva, Janice Mascarenhas, Fujioka and Loren Minzú will participate, as well as Anti Ribeiro, from Recife (PE) and Carchiris, from São Luiz (MA); from outside Brazil are Carolina Favre (Argentina) and GianMarco Porru (Italy). Before, on 4/11, the opening exhibition of the new headquarters of the Rio institution will close, Overflowing Life and the Desires of the World, a collective with works by 11 artists, many of them unpublished. The curatorial proposal is signed by Lorraine Mendes – assistant to Igor Simões in of the Brazils –, Mosqueira, Ana Clara Simões Lopes and Catarina Duncan.

Participating in the collective are artists Denise Alves Rodrigues (MT), Dyó Potiguara (RJ), Efe Godoy (MG), Felipe Meres (RJ), Iah Bahia (RJ), Juno B (CE), Luana Vitra (MG), Manfredo de Souzanetto (MG), Patricia Dominguez (Chile), Rubens Takamine (RJ) and Zheng Bo (China). This Saturday (21), Overflowing and the Desires of the World carries out its third and final cycle, a special educational project program, aimed at students in the public education network.

Solar also made an open call to send works for the exhibition Unmeasured Hearts, in honor of the photographer and painter Rochelle Costi, who died in November last year. Registration is open until 29/10, and works must be sent to the institution between 30/10 and 6/11. The exhibition will take place in parallel with the resident artists.

In June, Mosqueira was announced as the first chief curator of the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art in New York. One of his first missions at ISLAA, which was involved in the exhibition Radical women: Latin American art, 1960-1985, in 2018, at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, is the opening to the public, on 28/10, of the new headquarters in Tribeca. At the same time, he remains on the Curatorial Committee of the ArtRio Foco Prize, of which he was the creator, and which in 2023 completed a decade.

Solar dos Abacaxis was founded in 2015, in the historic mansion of Cosme Velho that bears its name. In December last year, the institution moved to a three-story townhouse on Rua do Senado, in the center of Rio, where in September, after renovations, it held its first inaugural exhibition. In this year's edition of ArtRio, he made another edition of his Halo edition Solar, the non-profit organization's Circle of Supporters, presenting 36 never-before-seen photos produced by Ayrson Heráclito – artist participating in the 35th Bienal de São Paulo and curator of Reverse and Transverse, on display until 28/10 at Galeria Estação –, with images of the elements used in Candomblé for cures and treatments.

Despite the new position at ISLAA, Solar, however, does not waste space (or time) on the agenda of Mosqueira, one of its founders. In an interview with arte!brasileiros, the curator, researcher and writer says that Solar was born in an environment of “opposition to Rio’s institutional system”, through street exhibitions or the creation of temporary institutions, among other experiments proposed by “a generation that was more radically thinking about the inclusion of artists and forms of artistic practice that had been relegated to the margins”.

Solar dos Abacaxis, continues Mosqueira, arises from a crossing of the desires of two generations, between the 1990s and 2000s: on the one hand, there was a desire to criticize institutional models and create new ones; on the other, there was an interest in reflecting on how to include those who were not part of such institutions. “A practice that seeks to build other institutional modalities that could handle other forms of life, other ways of feeling and thinking, of producing results more aligned with a certain idea of ​​justice or construction, in the present, of other possibilities of living ”, explains Mosqueira.

More exhibitions later, Mosqueira considers that Solar dos Abacaxis is, today, a “robust project”. “Today I am experiencing things that we dreamed of and planned back in 2015,” he says. Dreaming alongside him was the architect Adriano Carneiro de Mendonça, now executive director of Solar, whose first headquarters belonged to his family. “When we met, through the artist Marina Simão, he quickly understood what my proposal was. Over time, we understood that Solar, institutionally, did not depend on the house. We were spending more time. energy and thought with that property [they considered buying] than with our actual mission”.

Mosqueira says that they were “nomadic” for around a year and a half, during which they held exhibitions in partnership with other institutions, such as the residence Bela Maré , another with MAM Rio, a series of actions in Recife, São Paulo and other cities in Rio while they were looking for a new headquarters. In New York, before ISLAA, Mosqueira completed a master's degree, but he credits his experience with Solar with the expertise he now takes to his role as chief curator at the institute.

“I learned by making Solar, literally building it, what the plasticity of an institution is, how it is possible to create an institution in other ways. Therefore, it is more of an institutional practice than a curatorial one that I bring a lot from Solar to ISLAA”, she reflects. “One of Solar’s ​​principles is the idea that we have no obligation to repeat old institutional ways of being that do not relate to our values. At ISLAA, this experience is very important because the institute does not have a conventional format, it is not a museum, a gallery, an agency, an embassy. There is no specific model.”

Mosqueira also explains that part of his responsibilities in the new position is to take care of the ISLAA collection, but, above all, to organize exhibitions based on it – according to the curator, the collection is very extensive, rich and complex – and make acquisitions to complement it. One of the future exhibitions, scheduled to open on 28/10, revisits The Potosí principle, presented in 2010 at Reina Sofía, intertwining it with the institute's collection. “It is a time of great expansion, whose main objective is to strengthen its public dimension, not only through the construction of the new headquarters, but by creating new partnerships, making new publications and establishing new internal and external protocols”, he says. “This is one of the things I like to do most: inventing how to do it”.

 

 

 

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