GES-2 House of Culture. Photo: Anya Todich
GES-2 House of Culture. Photo: Anya Todich

Despite the thousands of kilometers separating Brazil and Russia and the very distinct cultural traits between the countries, no type of “translation” is necessary for artistic works from one corner of the world to be understood, or at least enjoyed, on the other side of the planet. This is the basic idea behind the exhibition. videobrasil. Needs No Translation: Four decades of video and performance, which brings to Moscow works from the Videobrasil Collection representing four decades of production from the Global South.

Opening on December 12, the exhibition is curated by Solange Oliveira Farkas, founder and director of Videobrasil, and Alessandra Bergamaschi, who selected works mainly by Brazilian artists, but also from other South American and African countries, to be presented at the GES-2 House of Culture, in the Russian capital. They will also be joined by a “Russian nucleus”, curated by Andrei Vasilenko and Dmitry Belkin, and a new installation by the artist from Minas Gerais, Eder Santos, a collaborator of Videobrasil since its beginnings, in the 1980s.

If the notion that a work does not need to be explained in order to be enjoyed can be applied to any artistic production, more broadly, there are particularities in the exhibition that emphasize this idea and justify the choice of the title – “does not require translation”, in free transposition. By prioritizing the expressive means of video and performance, in which image and body are protagonists and dispense with spoken or written language, “a universal hybrid format that exists beyond the borders of states and native languages ​​and, therefore, does not require translation” is highlighted, as explained in the text introducing the exhibition.

“Hybridity is a fundamental part of our history, but we wanted to emphasize a particularity of this hybridity that is marked by the strong presence of performance throughout four decades of video in Brazil, so well represented in our collection,” adds Solange on this subject. The association’s collection, formed mostly by works presented throughout the 22 editions of the Videobrasil festival/biennial, held since 1983, is one of the richest collections of video art in the Global South.

The second particularity embraced in the curatorial concept refers to the connections and parallels that can be drawn between the productions of regions as distant as Latin America and Russia, however unlikely they may seem. According to Belkin, “a unique dialogue between the art of two rarely compared regions will show how remarkably similar cultural change has occurred in two opposite parts of the globe. Video art has captured all the historical upheavals: from the global social change of the mid-1980s, through the hope and global peace of the 1990s and 2000s, to the analysis of its past in the 2010s.”

The division of the exhibition by decades, commented on by the Russian curator, was a choice made by Solange and Alessandra so that visitors can explore and understand some key moments in the history of video and performance in the Global South, especially in Brazil: starting with the first experiments made possible by the development of video technology, moving on to the languages ​​of music videos and TV, and arriving at the widespread use of computer graphics and virtual reality.

The exhibition includes iconic works from the last two decades of the 20th century, such as Prepared VT AC/JC (1986), by Walter Silveira and Pedro Vieira, Parabolic People (1991), by Sandra Kogut, and Blow (2000), by Rivane Neuenschwander and Cao Guimaraes; to the production that marks the new millennium, in works such as Golden film (2010), by Luiz Roque, The Tree of Oublier (2013), by Paulo Nazareth, and BUGS (2022), digital animation presented by Vitória Cribb at the most recent Sesc_Videobrasil Biennial, last year.

Sandra Kogut, Parabolic people [still], 1991. ©Videobrasil Collection, Acervo Videobrasil
Sandra Kogut, Parabolic people [still], 1991. ©Videobrasil Collection, Acervo Videobrasil
Also at the intersection between video and performance, works by foreign artists such as Ar Detroy (Argentina), Bakary Diallo (Mali), Calderón & Piñeros (Colombia), Ezra Wube (Ethiopia) and Guillermo Casanova (Uruguay) join the works of Brazilian artists, creating a broader panorama of the production of countries marked by a common colonial past, where issues such as social inequality, political conflicts and racial issues are latent, in different ways, to this day.

Considering the concept of the Global South as a geopolitical notion – not a geographic one – and also one that changes over time, Solange recalls that since it opened up to international participation in the 1990s, Videobrasil has received a large number of submissions of works by Russian artists. One example is the video Biographies of objects, by Natalia Skobeeva, a work that was included in the exhibition and that questions nationalisms, rigid traditions and the crisis of the contemporary world.

In addition to Skobeeva’s work, part of the Videobrasil Collection, a series of other videos from the country hosting the exhibition – the “Russian core” – complement the show, echoing what is presented in each of the time axes. “The exhibition will allow us to see works of video art from all over the world that have never been shown in Russia before, as well as well-known Russian works in a completely new context,” says Belkin.

Natalia Skobeeva, Biographies of objects [still], 2018. © Videobrasil Collection - Acervo Videobrasil
Natalia Skobeeva, Biographies of objects [still], 2018. ©Videobrasil Collection – Acervo Videobrasil
Finally, the unpublished work Screen², by Eder Santos, emerges as a central work in the exhibition, both for its format – an “expanded documentary installed in the space”, with an original soundtrack by Paulo Santos – and for bringing into dialogue several of the most iconic video performances from the Videobrasil Collection, by names such as Ana Pi, Ayrson Heráclito, Lenora de Barros, Letícia Ramos, Melati Suryodarmo, Otávio Donasci and Rosana Paulino. “In this suspended atrium, figures, gestures and landscapes fade away and mirror each other – like moving memories from a living archive”, describe the curators.

 

SERVICE

Videobrasil. Needs No Translation: Four Decades of Video and Performance
When: December 12, 2024 to February 9, 2025
Where: GES-2 House of Culture | 15 Bolotnaya Embankment, Moscow – Russia
Entry to the Casa da Cultura is free, subject to prior registration. ges-2.org

 


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