Flaminia Manifesto

The Pinacoteca's last exhibition of 2025, “Carnival Work”, is a collective exhibition with works by 70 artists from different generations and backgrounds, such as Alberto Pitta, Bajado, Barbara Wagner, Ilu Obá de Min, Heitor dos Prazeres, Juarez Paraíso, Lita Cerqueira, Maria Apparecida Urbano, Rafa Bqueer and Rosa Magalhães.

The exhibition at the Pina Contemporânea building displays 200 works including props, decoration projects and historical documentation in photography and video, as well as commissions for new projects by the artists. adonai, Ana Lira e Ray Vianna.

Divided into four themes – Fantasy fabric, Jobs, The ability to  e City, “Carnival Work” presents the country's largest popular festival as a production chain that involves the work of many hands even before the festival takes place, while alluding to the precariousness and invisibility of these professionals.

THEMATIC CENTERS

The core Fantasy fabric refers to two characteristic elements of Carnival: the act of dressing up and the power of imagination. Projects and sketches are part of the central part of the Grand Gallery, such as studies of J. Cunha for the Salvador carnival and Joana Lira for the street decorations in Recife.

Discussions about the party's working conditions are presented in the core Jobs, in which works are presented that bring to light the representation of workers.

The relationship between carnival and urban or rural space appears in the core City through representations of blocks, cordons, afoxés and other forms of processions. The center brings together works such as photographs taken by Diego Nigro in the Galo da Madrugada carnival block (2025).

Finally, the core The ability to  celebrates the meetings of sugarcane workers in Pernambuco transforming themselves into kings and queens of maracatu, as well as black women and marginalized peripheral groups becoming, for a few days, the figures of command during the festival in Bahia: Ebony Goddesses, Reis Momos, Carnival Queens.

Service
Exhibition Carnival Work
From November 8, 2025 to April 12, 2026
Wednesday to Monday, from 10:18 to XNUMX:XNUMX

The National Museum of Afro-Brazilian Culture (MUNCAB) inaugurates the exhibition “Memory: accounts of another history”, one of the central events of France-Brazil 2025 Season.

Curated by Nadine Hounkpatin e Jamile Coelhothe exhibition brings together 20 black female artists From the African diaspora and the African continent, who appropriate the visual arts as a field for elaborating memory and symbolically reconstructing the world. Their productions establish a decolonial thought, in which art acts as a form of listening, rewriting, and re-existence.

Participants: Amélia Sampaio, Barbara Asei Dantoni, Barbara Portailler, Beya Gille Gacha, Charlotte Yonga, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar, Enam Gbewonyo, Fabiana Ex-Souza, Gosette Lubondo, Josèfa Ntjam, Luana Vitra, Luisa Magaly, Luma Nascimento, Madalena dos Santos Reinbolt, Maria Lídia dos Santos Magliani, Myriam Mihindou, Na Chainkua Reindorf, Selly Raby Kane, Tuli Mekondjo and YêdaMaria.

After touring Bordeaux, Abidjan, Yaoundé, and Antananarivo, the exhibition arrives in Salvador—a city where African heritage manifests itself as an aesthetic and artistic foundation—to establish a new chapter in the project. At MUNCAB, these artists construct a territory of enunciation and reparation, in which image, body, and gesture become instruments for reconfiguring historical narratives and affirming Black subjectivities.

The exhibition is a project of the Ministry of Culture, Petrobras, and the French Embassy in Brazil, in partnership with MUNCAB, and managed by Amafro.

Service
Exhibition Memory: accounts of another history
November 04th to March 1st, 2026
Tuesday to Sunday, from 10:00 AM to 4:30 PM, Saturday from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM

A DM Mendes Wood We are pleased to present the exhibition. Birth & Standardization de Antonio Oba, which occupies the entire gallery space in Barra Funda with new and emblematic works. The works, developed using distinct techniques such as painting, drawing, installation, and film, continue the artist's investigation into the construction of national identity, and its contradictions and influences, through icons and symbols present in Brazilian culture.

The exhibition's title stems from the idea of ​​birth as a marker of a moment, of a new existence on Earth. This miraculous event also carries the counterpart of fortune and luck, which accompanies us from conception. For Obá, “Being subject to this is not about a choice. Being subject to this is about an irreverence towards the inevitable. So, what we can do is demarcate these various fortunes through rite, celebration, symbol, and language.”

Each work that makes up the exhibition contributes to this attempt to situate the idea of ​​luck, fortune, sometimes as a prayer, sometimes as a ritual that celebrates it.

An unprecedented installation, located in an enclosed space at the back of the gallery, directly refers to the idea of ​​play and luck. In it, columns of cowrie shells spill over gilded bronze sieves, carrying ceramic eggs painted red. The cowrie shells represent elements of an attempt to read luck, destiny, and fate, and symbolize the currency of exchange, which also transforms into an offering. In their arrangement within the space, the cowrie shells form ascending columns, like a territory of spiritual elevation and re-signification of life in the face of its potentially fatalistic aspects.

At the entrance to the exhibition space, a path of swords representing Saint George and Iansã leads to a new installation: an altar with two tree trunks symbolizing the pillory. The trunks are entirely studded with nails—in one, the nails point outwards; in the other, inwards—symbolizing protection and punishment and the difficulty of harmonizing tensions. Between the pillories, cables suspend a bronze head with a plumb bob at the tip. This installation is an offering to the lord of the path, therefore, it has a connection with Exu.

the installation Ka'a porá (2024), presented for the first time in the traveling exhibition Finca-Pé: Stories of the Land At the CCBB in Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, and Brasília, it occupies a prominent place in the exhibition. Sculptures of feet, representing both the human foot and that of a tree, emphasize the connection with the ground. The configuration of the work resembles a small garden, with trunks arranged in a seemingly random way, each suggesting a different direction within a labyrinth. The title of the installation derives from the Tupi term. ka'a porá, which refers to an individual who settles and anchors themselves to the land. The expression also alludes to the mythical figure of Caipora, protector of the forests in Brazilian indigenous mythology. Another symbolic element of the installation revisits the concept of pruning, understood here as an act of violence that breaks with life and nature.

Paintings of varying sizes and techniques compose the visual narrative of the exhibition. A set of 22 small-format paintings presents Obá's interpretation of the Tarot. In these works, the artist uses a mixture of techniques along with gold leaf, giving a unique magical and fantastical tone to the oracle cards. In addition to these, the exhibition includes new large-scale paintings, as well as a work painted directly onto one of the walls of the exhibition space. In these pieces, figures and symbols that make up Brazilian identity suggest new interpretations. The exhibition also includes previously unseen drawings made with charcoal, India ink, pencil, and tempera on canvas.

The film Charmed (2024) presents a performance by the artist that proposes reflections on symbolic systems — especially religious ones. The performative action evokes a ritualistic perspective, centered on the figure of the pilgrim, who, in his gesture, synthesizes elements of belief, culture and tradition associated with the imagery of the pilgrim.

With this collection of works, which spans different media and symbolisms, the exhibition reaffirms the power of Antonio Obá's production in constructing a poetics that investigates identity, territory, and spirituality.

Service
Exhibition Birth
From November 8th March 14, 2026
Tuesday to Friday, from 11 am to 19 pm, Saturday from 10 am to 17 pm

at the exhibition Tania Candiani: Underground, the Red, Tania CandianiThrough embroidery, drawings, videos, sound art, and installation, she transforms the subterranean networks of roots into a tactile cartography of entanglements, in which matter becomes a sign of the energies that permeate the soil.

The works in this solo exhibition map these living webs where natural, non-human, and sonic systems converge, revealing the invisible vibrations and resonances that traverse the subterranean realm.

Each embroidery in the Roots Systems series is constructed around a horizon line, a boundary between what we see and what remains hidden, where structures expand across the ground forming networks that transcend the scale of the visible plant. The machine embroidery carries the sound and vibration of these constantly moving networks.

The same series unfolds in two sets of drawings, one in spray paint and the other in India ink. In the first, roots of different individuals of the same species are engraved on cotton paper. They are diptychs in which each individual occupies a frame, but both seem on the verge of touching, expanding from a common center. The breath of the spray suggests diffusion and indefiniteness, creation and dissolution. The encounter between the individuals becomes a zone of passage and creation, an intermediate space where something communicates, transforms, or is born. Candiani speaks of these drawings as expressions of a cellular, entangled communication, approaching nebulae, like cosmic synapses.

The ink drawings are based on shallow roots, which are root systems that spread close to the soil surface, rather than developing in depth. These roots expand horizontally in search of water and nutrients in arid environments and shallow soils; they are networks that seek sustenance in scarcity.

Different fields of knowledge, such as biology, philosophy, and the arts, bring architecture closer to the superficial roots of neural networks. Structurally, these roots expand in multiple directions, forming interconnected networks similar to the synapses of the cognitive mesh.

Just as neurons exchange electrical impulses, roots communicate through chemical and bioelectrical signals with each other, and with fungi and bacteria in the soil. This subterranean network acts as an "ecological brain," perceiving and adapting the plant organism to its environment. Both the neural network and the superficial root system constitute rhizomatic life forms, based on entanglement: lateral expansions that construct meaning and continuity through connection.

Subterranean communication is also the central theme of the works Subterra: Roots, a circular video and a multi-channel soundscape that expand the perception of this living network. The video, circular like a hatch, presents a continuous flow of roots, fungi, and microorganisms in motion, in a gradual dive through the layers of soil. The soundscape, composed of low-frequency subsonic vibrations, creates an immersive atmosphere that evokes the inaudible hum of moving subterranean networks, like a resonance field where different materials communicate.

Also included in Subterra: Roots is a large double rhizotron, built specifically for the exhibition, in which corn plants grow. The device—a box with large glass windows where the plants develop—is used in scientific research to observe root growth and allows for continuous monitoring of what normally remains hidden in the soil.

In this work, the root system ceases to be merely a representation and presents itself as a living body in transformation. By integrating the plant growth process into the exhibition experience, Candiani brings science and sensitivity closer together, incorporating the time of subterranean movement that runs throughout the show. With the exhibition's long duration, the rhizotron will transform the landscape of the installation with each visit to Subterrânea.

The exhibition will be on display until December 19, 2025, and between January 12 and February 13, 2026.

Service
Exhibition | Tania Candiani: Underground
From November 13 to February 13, 2026
Monday to Friday from 10:19 to 11:17, Saturday from XNUMX:XNUMX to XNUMX:XNUMX

A DAN Gallery presents the exhibition Brazil during the Modernist period, curated by Maria Alice MillietGathering around 50 works emblematic of fundamental names such as Tarsila do Amaral, Di Cavalcanti, Cícero Dias, Victor Brecheret, Cândido Portinari, Guignard, Alfredo Volpi, Anita Malfatti Among others, the collective exhibition traces an overview of modern art in the country and highlights the role of the movement that, starting in the 1920s, redefined the national artistic language and added updated visions of the Brazilian popular imagination to the collective imagination.

The Brazil of the Modernists takes as its starting point the transformations that marked the emergence of artistic modernity in Brazil, a movement that consolidated itself in the confrontation between cultural conservatism and the impulse for renewal of a country in transition. The Modern Art Week of 1922 is revisited here as a symbolic landmark of this clash: booed by the public, it exposed the resistance to new languages ​​and the rupture with traditional standards, inaugurating a production focused on aesthetic updating and the construction of a Brazilian artistic identity.

The curatorial journey portrays how the first modernists, in search of training and recognition, turned to the great artistic centers of Europe. It was from this experience that many began to perceive the strength and originality of Brazilian cultural diversity in the construction of their own artistic identities. “Our modernists didn't need to seek in exotic places the popular or ethnic content that so enchanted Europeans. They found in our landscapes and customs the ingredients for the constitution of a visuality of national character,” affirms curator Maria Alice Milliet.

Although influenced by European avant-garde movements, modern art in Brazil remained faithful to figuration. Contact with the "return to order" movement in the interwar period led artists to explore expressionist, cubist, and later surrealist languages, in a process that defined the aesthetic foundations of early Brazilian modernism.

Among the highlights of the exhibition is the Portrait of Judite (1944), by Alfredo Volpi. Painted in the year the artist married Benedita da Conceição, known as Judite, the work depicts his wife nude between curtains, with open arms, as if presenting the paintings that surround her. Volpi, who began his career decorating São Paulo facades, developed his own language, marked by geometrization and the refined use of color. His work symbolizes the transition from figurative painting to a mature, enlightened modernity with a strong Brazilian identity.

“It is undeniable that Tarsila, Di Cavalcanti, Cícero Dias, Rego Monteiro, Brecheret, Portinari, and Guignard constituted an iconographic corpus identified with Brazil. More than that, modernism added to the national imagination updated visions of our sociocultural reality. In other words, when we think of Brazilian women, the sensuality of the dark-haired women painted by Di Cavalcanti comes to mind; the history of the conquest of our territory is realized in Brecheret's Monument to the Bandeiras; our myths are those of Tarsila; our beaches are those of Pancetti; and popular festivals find their best expression in the colorful little flags of Volpi,” adds Maria Alice Milliet regarding the exhibition's theme.

By bringing together fundamental works from the period, the exhibition "Brazil of the Modernists" highlights the historical and cultural relevance of the movement that redefined the course of art in the country. The group show reinforces the role of this generation of artists in building a visual identity and reaffirms the continued relevance of their legacy in shaping what is understood as Brazilianness.

Artists present

Alberto da Veiga Guignard, Alfredo Volpi, Anita Malfatti, Candido Portinari, Cícero Dias, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, Ernesto De Fiori, Ismael Nery, José Pancetti, Tarsila do Amaral, Vicente do Rego Monteiro, and Victor Brecheret.

Service
Exhibition Brazil during the Modernist period
From November 19th to January 19th
Monday to Friday, from 10 am to 19 pm, Saturdays from 10 am to 13 pm.

A central figure in the history of cinema, with films that have marked generations. Agnès Varda (1928–2019) is also the author of an extensive photographic production, having even begun her career as a photographer. Over the years, she established herself as a filmmaker, but photography remained present in her trajectory, whether in her films or in the artistic installations she produced in the 21st century. This facet of her work, still less known to the public, is presented in the exhibition Photography AGNÈS VARDA Cinema, which opens on IMS Paulista, with free entry.

The exposure Photography AGNÈS VARDA Cinema The exhibition brings together approximately 200 photographs taken by Varda, primarily between the 1950s and 1960s. The collection includes images captured during her travels, including previously unseen photographs from China in 1957, photos from Cuba in the post-revolutionary context, and from the USA, where the artist documented the Black Panthers. There are also photos taken in Paris, such as those of a play staged by the Griots, the city's first Black theatre company. In dialogue with these photographs, the exhibition presents excerpts from the artist's films, emphasizing how social commitment, an affectionate gaze, and humor characterize her work.

Service
Exhibition | Photography AGNÈS VARDA Cinema
From November 29th to April 12th, 2026
Tuesday to Sunday and holidays from 10am to 20pm (closed on Mondays)

The international exhibition Joaquín Torres García – 150 yearsThis exhibition, a first in the country, celebrates the career of one of the pillars of modern art in Latin America, with approximately 500 items, including works of art and documents such as paintings, unpublished manuscripts, maquettes, drawings, and the famous wooden toys produced by the Uruguayan artist's family.

This is the first time that such a large and diverse collection of the artist's work has been presented in Brazil, with pieces that will leave the Uruguayan museum's storage for the first time, revealing little-known aspects of the artist's production to the public.

Curated by Saul of Tarsus in collaboration with Torres García MuseumThe exhibition deepens the understanding of "constructive universalism" and presents Torres García as a thinker of global reach. The pedagogy of Taller Torres García, The exhibition also explains the idea that Latin American artists should develop their own art without depending on European and North American influences. The proposal was to encourage each artist to seek their roots, symbols, and local references, creating a more authentic production connected to the culture of the continent—something that directly relates to the selection present in the exhibition.

Institutions such as the Museo Torres García (Uruguay), the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art), the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern [Valencia Institute of Modern Art], the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (Chile), as well as Brazilian collections such as MASP and the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, contribute with essential loans.

This project is supported by the Federal Law for Cultural Incentive – Lei Rouanet and sponsored by BB Asset.

Service
Exhibition Joaquín Torres García – 150 years
From December 10th to March 09th, 2026
Open every day from 9am to 20pm, except Tuesdays.

The artist Luiza Sigulem inaugurates his second solo exhibition, A guide to traveling the shortest distance from one point to another., with its opening scheduled for January 24, 2026, in Workshop 397, in São Paulo. Bringing together a unique collection of works, the exhibition, curated by Juliana Caffé, explores the relationship between body, architecture and time, proposing displacement as an operation of adjustment and critical reflection.

The project takes instability as a condition that reorganizes the relationship between body and architecture, producing a time that does not coincide with the logic of efficiency. In tune with Crip theory (a term reappropriated from cripple, which names practices that displace the "standard body") and the concept of crip time—a temporality that embraces pauses, variable rhythms, and non-alignment with the productivist clock—Sigulem's work affirms difference not as an exception, but as a method.

“Throughout my process, the lack of accessibility manifested itself in the time needed to deal with small and large obstacles and in the attention required for minimal adjustments that accumulated almost imperceptibly,” the artist states. “This experience shifted the idea of ​​efficiency and brought my production closer to a notion of expanded time, in which the rhythm of the body does not coincide with the normative expectation of capitalist reproduction. It is in this mismatch that my work is constructed.”

The project, which for the first time incorporates video performances, interventions, and a sculpture in dialogue with photography, marks a moment of expansion in the artist's trajectory and places accessibility at the center of the aesthetic and poetic construction. It also highlights the invisibility of a significant portion of the population: according to data from the 2022 PNAD Contínua (IBGE), Brazil has approximately 18,6 million people with disabilities, of which approximately 3,4 million have physical disabilities in their lower limbs, a group that faces daily the architectural barriers discussed in the exhibition.

Architecture and poetics: an expository inversion

The project stems from an unavoidable fact of the São Paulo context: the structural difficulty of finding exhibition spaces capable of accommodating the artist's research in a way that is coherent with her issues. Faced with the lack of viable alternatives and institutional deadlines, the exhibition embraced this limitation as part of the project, transforming it into a field of reflection.

“The choice of Ateliê397 as the exhibition venue responds to this context. As an independent space, it offers a conceptual openness and a real field for negotiation in the construction of this project,” comments curator Juliana Caffé. “Located on Travessa Dona Paula, in an area marked by important cultural facilities that are also limited in terms of accessibility, the space is incorporated by the exhibition as an active element, ceasing to operate as a neutral support and integrating architecture, circulation, and surroundings into the proposed field of discussion.”

Given the architectural limitations of the Atelier, Sigulem does not treat the lack of accessibility as an obstacle to be corrected, but as a condition to be critically addressed. The exhibition design operates a deliberate inversion: instead of adapting the space to a normative standard, it is the public that is led to recalibrate their bodies in the face of reduced passageways and displaced scales.

In this sense, the exhibition presents an installation, developed by the artist in collaboration with the architectural duo Francisco Rivas and Rodrigo Messina, which brings together accessibility and permanence devices conceived as a constitutive part of the work. The intervention reorganizes the reception area: the door and frame were moved to allow for full opening (180°); benches and stools were distributed to accommodate rest; and cushions on the outdoor benches extend the experience to the surroundings.

The radical nature of the proposal is reflected in the institutional occupation: the side of the staircase, which leads to a second floor inaccessible to people with disabilities, was converted into a small library of Crip theory. “During the exhibition, Ateliê397 agreed to render the upper floor inoperable, suspending its use as a projection room to make the architectural limitation explicit instead of concealing it. And, as an external development, the project includes the production and donation of custom-made mobile ramps for neighboring cultural spaces in the village, prompting the circuit to collectively consider its accessibility conditions,” Caffé points out.

The project aligns with contemporary debates that seek visibility without capture, where the work operates through sensation, rhythm, and bodily micro-events that are not reduced to an "explanatory" image or easily consumable content. It is an approach that recognizes access as aesthetics and disability as a diagnosis of space and norms. In this way, curatorship and exhibition design become an active part of the work. Texts in Braille, audio description, and photo-tactile guides accompany the exhibition, whose operation and mediation incorporate the hiring of people with disabilities, respecting different circulation times.

Furthermore, all the devices in the exhibition were made with simple and low-cost materials, affirming the possibility of creating welcoming spaces even in architectural designs that do not fully comply with legal regulations.

Body in negotiation: video, sculpture and photography

In previous works, Sigulem invited the viewer to adjust to certain scales, as in the series Jeito de Corpo (2024). In this solo exhibition, the artist places her own body at the center of the experience. Different works explore this shift in perspective, sometimes proposing situations in which the public is led to reorient their spatial perception, and sometimes accompanying the artist in gestures of continuous negotiation with space.

The videos are based on reinterpretations of historical performances, created from the artist's body and traversed by issues of gender and power. The actions do not seek fidelity to the original gesture, but operate as a situated translation, in which each movement bears the mark of a necessary adjustment. The camera follows the process without correcting the deviation, allowing the flaw and the effort to remain visible.

This is the case with the previously unreleased series Ramps (2025), a set of twenty photographs derived from the video-performance Painting (Retouching) (based on Francis Alÿs). In the video, the artist marks points on the streets of São Paulo with yellow paint where access ramps should exist, highlighting the lack of accessibility in the urban landscape. The photographs isolate these gestures and traces, transforming the performative action into images that record the friction between body, city, and infrastructure.

By adopting the height of a wheelchair user's field of vision as a reference point, the exhibition shifts the normative scale of the exhibition space and introduces a regime of perception in which the body does not adjust to the architecture, but rather the architecture becomes an index of its limitations.

A sculpture punctuates the space, testing the boundaries between function and failure and questioning structures designed to guide movement. In an installation, a video dedicated to the image of falling articulates its repetition as a physical and symbolic experience. Together, the works suggest that every trajectory is traversed by detours, pauses, and negotiations, and that the shortest distance between two points rarely presents itself as a straight line.

The exhibition "Manual for Traveling the Shortest Distance from One Point to Another" is part of the "Jeito de Corpo" project, funded by the PNAB CULTURE FUNDING CALL NO. 25/2024, from the Secretariat of Culture, Economy and Creative Industries, State of São Paulo.

Service
Exhibition | A guide to traveling the shortest distance from one point to another
From January 24th to February 28th
Wednesday to Saturday, from 14pm to 18pm

The Pinacoteca's last exhibition of 2025, “Carnival Work”, is a collective exhibition with works by 70 artists from different generations and backgrounds, such as Alberto Pitta, Bajado, Barbara Wagner, Ilu Obá de Min, Heitor dos Prazeres, Juarez Paraíso, Lita Cerqueira, Maria Apparecida Urbano, Rafa Bqueer and Rosa Magalhães.

The exhibition at the Pina Contemporânea building displays 200 works including props, decoration projects and historical documentation in photography and video, as well as commissions for new projects by the artists. adonai, Ana Lira e Ray Vianna.

Divided into four themes – Fantasy fabric, Jobs, The ability to  e City, “Carnival Work” presents the country's largest popular festival as a production chain that involves the work of many hands even before the festival takes place, while alluding to the precariousness and invisibility of these professionals.

THEMATIC CENTERS

The core Fantasy fabric refers to two characteristic elements of Carnival: the act of dressing up and the power of imagination. Projects and sketches are part of the central part of the Grand Gallery, such as studies of J. Cunha for the Salvador carnival and Joana Lira for the street decorations in Recife.

Discussions about the party's working conditions are presented in the core Jobs, in which works are presented that bring to light the representation of workers.

The relationship between carnival and urban or rural space appears in the core City through representations of blocks, cordons, afoxés and other forms of processions. The center brings together works such as photographs taken by Diego Nigro in the Galo da Madrugada carnival block (2025).

Finally, the core The ability to  celebrates the meetings of sugarcane workers in Pernambuco transforming themselves into kings and queens of maracatu, as well as black women and marginalized peripheral groups becoming, for a few days, the figures of command during the festival in Bahia: Ebony Goddesses, Reis Momos, Carnival Queens.

Service
Exhibition Carnival Work
From November 8, 2025 to April 12, 2026
Wednesday to Monday, from 10:18 to XNUMX:XNUMX

The National Museum of Afro-Brazilian Culture (MUNCAB) inaugurates the exhibition “Memory: accounts of another history”, one of the central events of France-Brazil 2025 Season.

Curated by Nadine Hounkpatin e Jamile Coelhothe exhibition brings together 20 black female artists From the African diaspora and the African continent, who appropriate the visual arts as a field for elaborating memory and symbolically reconstructing the world. Their productions establish a decolonial thought, in which art acts as a form of listening, rewriting, and re-existence.

Participants: Amélia Sampaio, Barbara Asei Dantoni, Barbara Portailler, Beya Gille Gacha, Charlotte Yonga, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar, Enam Gbewonyo, Fabiana Ex-Souza, Gosette Lubondo, Josèfa Ntjam, Luana Vitra, Luisa Magaly, Luma Nascimento, Madalena dos Santos Reinbolt, Maria Lídia dos Santos Magliani, Myriam Mihindou, Na Chainkua Reindorf, Selly Raby Kane, Tuli Mekondjo and YêdaMaria.

After touring Bordeaux, Abidjan, Yaoundé, and Antananarivo, the exhibition arrives in Salvador—a city where African heritage manifests itself as an aesthetic and artistic foundation—to establish a new chapter in the project. At MUNCAB, these artists construct a territory of enunciation and reparation, in which image, body, and gesture become instruments for reconfiguring historical narratives and affirming Black subjectivities.

The exhibition is a project of the Ministry of Culture, Petrobras, and the French Embassy in Brazil, in partnership with MUNCAB, and managed by Amafro.

Service
Exhibition Memory: accounts of another history
November 04th to March 1st, 2026
Tuesday to Sunday, from 10:00 AM to 4:30 PM, Saturday from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM

A DM Mendes Wood We are pleased to present the exhibition. Birth & Standardization de Antonio Oba, which occupies the entire gallery space in Barra Funda with new and emblematic works. The works, developed using distinct techniques such as painting, drawing, installation, and film, continue the artist's investigation into the construction of national identity, and its contradictions and influences, through icons and symbols present in Brazilian culture.

The exhibition's title stems from the idea of ​​birth as a marker of a moment, of a new existence on Earth. This miraculous event also carries the counterpart of fortune and luck, which accompanies us from conception. For Obá, “Being subject to this is not about a choice. Being subject to this is about an irreverence towards the inevitable. So, what we can do is demarcate these various fortunes through rite, celebration, symbol, and language.”

Each work that makes up the exhibition contributes to this attempt to situate the idea of ​​luck, fortune, sometimes as a prayer, sometimes as a ritual that celebrates it.

An unprecedented installation, located in an enclosed space at the back of the gallery, directly refers to the idea of ​​play and luck. In it, columns of cowrie shells spill over gilded bronze sieves, carrying ceramic eggs painted red. The cowrie shells represent elements of an attempt to read luck, destiny, and fate, and symbolize the currency of exchange, which also transforms into an offering. In their arrangement within the space, the cowrie shells form ascending columns, like a territory of spiritual elevation and re-signification of life in the face of its potentially fatalistic aspects.

At the entrance to the exhibition space, a path of swords representing Saint George and Iansã leads to a new installation: an altar with two tree trunks symbolizing the pillory. The trunks are entirely studded with nails—in one, the nails point outwards; in the other, inwards—symbolizing protection and punishment and the difficulty of harmonizing tensions. Between the pillories, cables suspend a bronze head with a plumb bob at the tip. This installation is an offering to the lord of the path, therefore, it has a connection with Exu.

the installation Ka'a porá (2024), presented for the first time in the traveling exhibition Finca-Pé: Stories of the Land At the CCBB in Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, and Brasília, it occupies a prominent place in the exhibition. Sculptures of feet, representing both the human foot and that of a tree, emphasize the connection with the ground. The configuration of the work resembles a small garden, with trunks arranged in a seemingly random way, each suggesting a different direction within a labyrinth. The title of the installation derives from the Tupi term. ka'a porá, which refers to an individual who settles and anchors themselves to the land. The expression also alludes to the mythical figure of Caipora, protector of the forests in Brazilian indigenous mythology. Another symbolic element of the installation revisits the concept of pruning, understood here as an act of violence that breaks with life and nature.

Paintings of varying sizes and techniques compose the visual narrative of the exhibition. A set of 22 small-format paintings presents Obá's interpretation of the Tarot. In these works, the artist uses a mixture of techniques along with gold leaf, giving a unique magical and fantastical tone to the oracle cards. In addition to these, the exhibition includes new large-scale paintings, as well as a work painted directly onto one of the walls of the exhibition space. In these pieces, figures and symbols that make up Brazilian identity suggest new interpretations. The exhibition also includes previously unseen drawings made with charcoal, India ink, pencil, and tempera on canvas.

The film Charmed (2024) presents a performance by the artist that proposes reflections on symbolic systems — especially religious ones. The performative action evokes a ritualistic perspective, centered on the figure of the pilgrim, who, in his gesture, synthesizes elements of belief, culture and tradition associated with the imagery of the pilgrim.

With this collection of works, which spans different media and symbolisms, the exhibition reaffirms the power of Antonio Obá's production in constructing a poetics that investigates identity, territory, and spirituality.

Service
Exhibition Birth
From November 8th March 14, 2026
Tuesday to Friday, from 11 am to 19 pm, Saturday from 10 am to 17 pm

at the exhibition Tania Candiani: Underground, the Red, Tania CandianiThrough embroidery, drawings, videos, sound art, and installation, she transforms the subterranean networks of roots into a tactile cartography of entanglements, in which matter becomes a sign of the energies that permeate the soil.

The works in this solo exhibition map these living webs where natural, non-human, and sonic systems converge, revealing the invisible vibrations and resonances that traverse the subterranean realm.

Each embroidery in the Roots Systems series is constructed around a horizon line, a boundary between what we see and what remains hidden, where structures expand across the ground forming networks that transcend the scale of the visible plant. The machine embroidery carries the sound and vibration of these constantly moving networks.

The same series unfolds in two sets of drawings, one in spray paint and the other in India ink. In the first, roots of different individuals of the same species are engraved on cotton paper. They are diptychs in which each individual occupies a frame, but both seem on the verge of touching, expanding from a common center. The breath of the spray suggests diffusion and indefiniteness, creation and dissolution. The encounter between the individuals becomes a zone of passage and creation, an intermediate space where something communicates, transforms, or is born. Candiani speaks of these drawings as expressions of a cellular, entangled communication, approaching nebulae, like cosmic synapses.

The ink drawings are based on shallow roots, which are root systems that spread close to the soil surface, rather than developing in depth. These roots expand horizontally in search of water and nutrients in arid environments and shallow soils; they are networks that seek sustenance in scarcity.

Different fields of knowledge, such as biology, philosophy, and the arts, bring architecture closer to the superficial roots of neural networks. Structurally, these roots expand in multiple directions, forming interconnected networks similar to the synapses of the cognitive mesh.

Just as neurons exchange electrical impulses, roots communicate through chemical and bioelectrical signals with each other, and with fungi and bacteria in the soil. This subterranean network acts as an "ecological brain," perceiving and adapting the plant organism to its environment. Both the neural network and the superficial root system constitute rhizomatic life forms, based on entanglement: lateral expansions that construct meaning and continuity through connection.

Subterranean communication is also the central theme of the works Subterra: Roots, a circular video and a multi-channel soundscape that expand the perception of this living network. The video, circular like a hatch, presents a continuous flow of roots, fungi, and microorganisms in motion, in a gradual dive through the layers of soil. The soundscape, composed of low-frequency subsonic vibrations, creates an immersive atmosphere that evokes the inaudible hum of moving subterranean networks, like a resonance field where different materials communicate.

Also included in Subterra: Roots is a large double rhizotron, built specifically for the exhibition, in which corn plants grow. The device—a box with large glass windows where the plants develop—is used in scientific research to observe root growth and allows for continuous monitoring of what normally remains hidden in the soil.

In this work, the root system ceases to be merely a representation and presents itself as a living body in transformation. By integrating the plant growth process into the exhibition experience, Candiani brings science and sensitivity closer together, incorporating the time of subterranean movement that runs throughout the show. With the exhibition's long duration, the rhizotron will transform the landscape of the installation with each visit to Subterrânea.

The exhibition will be on display until December 19, 2025, and between January 12 and February 13, 2026.

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Exhibition | Tania Candiani: Underground
From November 13 to February 13, 2026
Monday to Friday from 10:19 to 11:17, Saturday from XNUMX:XNUMX to XNUMX:XNUMX

A central figure in the history of cinema, with films that have marked generations. Agnès Varda (1928–2019) is also the author of an extensive photographic production, having even begun her career as a photographer. Over the years, she established herself as a filmmaker, but photography remained present in her trajectory, whether in her films or in the artistic installations she produced in the 21st century. This facet of her work, still less known to the public, is presented in the exhibition Photography AGNÈS VARDA Cinema, which opens on IMS Paulista, with free entry.

The exposure Photography AGNÈS VARDA Cinema The exhibition brings together approximately 200 photographs taken by Varda, primarily between the 1950s and 1960s. The collection includes images captured during her travels, including previously unseen photographs from China in 1957, photos from Cuba in the post-revolutionary context, and from the USA, where the artist documented the Black Panthers. There are also photos taken in Paris, such as those of a play staged by the Griots, the city's first Black theatre company. In dialogue with these photographs, the exhibition presents excerpts from the artist's films, emphasizing how social commitment, an affectionate gaze, and humor characterize her work.

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Exhibition | Photography AGNÈS VARDA Cinema
From November 29th to April 12th, 2026
Tuesday to Sunday and holidays from 10am to 20pm (closed on Mondays)

The international exhibition Joaquín Torres García – 150 yearsThis exhibition, a first in the country, celebrates the career of one of the pillars of modern art in Latin America, with approximately 500 items, including works of art and documents such as paintings, unpublished manuscripts, maquettes, drawings, and the famous wooden toys produced by the Uruguayan artist's family.

This is the first time that such a large and diverse collection of the artist's work has been presented in Brazil, with pieces that will leave the Uruguayan museum's storage for the first time, revealing little-known aspects of the artist's production to the public.

Curated by Saul of Tarsus in collaboration with Torres García MuseumThe exhibition deepens the understanding of "constructive universalism" and presents Torres García as a thinker of global reach. The pedagogy of Taller Torres García, The exhibition also explains the idea that Latin American artists should develop their own art without depending on European and North American influences. The proposal was to encourage each artist to seek their roots, symbols, and local references, creating a more authentic production connected to the culture of the continent—something that directly relates to the selection present in the exhibition.

Institutions such as the Museo Torres García (Uruguay), the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art), the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern [Valencia Institute of Modern Art], the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (Chile), as well as Brazilian collections such as MASP and the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, contribute with essential loans.

This project is supported by the Federal Law for Cultural Incentive – Lei Rouanet and sponsored by BB Asset.

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Exhibition Joaquín Torres García – 150 years
From December 10th to March 09th, 2026
Open every day from 9am to 20pm, except Tuesdays.

The artist Luiza Sigulem inaugurates his second solo exhibition, A guide to traveling the shortest distance from one point to another., with its opening scheduled for January 24, 2026, in Workshop 397, in São Paulo. Bringing together a unique collection of works, the exhibition, curated by Juliana Caffé, explores the relationship between body, architecture and time, proposing displacement as an operation of adjustment and critical reflection.

The project takes instability as a condition that reorganizes the relationship between body and architecture, producing a time that does not coincide with the logic of efficiency. In tune with Crip theory (a term reappropriated from cripple, which names practices that displace the "standard body") and the concept of crip time—a temporality that embraces pauses, variable rhythms, and non-alignment with the productivist clock—Sigulem's work affirms difference not as an exception, but as a method.

“Throughout my process, the lack of accessibility manifested itself in the time needed to deal with small and large obstacles and in the attention required for minimal adjustments that accumulated almost imperceptibly,” the artist states. “This experience shifted the idea of ​​efficiency and brought my production closer to a notion of expanded time, in which the rhythm of the body does not coincide with the normative expectation of capitalist reproduction. It is in this mismatch that my work is constructed.”

The project, which for the first time incorporates video performances, interventions, and a sculpture in dialogue with photography, marks a moment of expansion in the artist's trajectory and places accessibility at the center of the aesthetic and poetic construction. It also highlights the invisibility of a significant portion of the population: according to data from the 2022 PNAD Contínua (IBGE), Brazil has approximately 18,6 million people with disabilities, of which approximately 3,4 million have physical disabilities in their lower limbs, a group that faces daily the architectural barriers discussed in the exhibition.

Architecture and poetics: an expository inversion

The project stems from an unavoidable fact of the São Paulo context: the structural difficulty of finding exhibition spaces capable of accommodating the artist's research in a way that is coherent with her issues. Faced with the lack of viable alternatives and institutional deadlines, the exhibition embraced this limitation as part of the project, transforming it into a field of reflection.

“The choice of Ateliê397 as the exhibition venue responds to this context. As an independent space, it offers a conceptual openness and a real field for negotiation in the construction of this project,” comments curator Juliana Caffé. “Located on Travessa Dona Paula, in an area marked by important cultural facilities that are also limited in terms of accessibility, the space is incorporated by the exhibition as an active element, ceasing to operate as a neutral support and integrating architecture, circulation, and surroundings into the proposed field of discussion.”

Given the architectural limitations of the Atelier, Sigulem does not treat the lack of accessibility as an obstacle to be corrected, but as a condition to be critically addressed. The exhibition design operates a deliberate inversion: instead of adapting the space to a normative standard, it is the public that is led to recalibrate their bodies in the face of reduced passageways and displaced scales.

In this sense, the exhibition presents an installation, developed by the artist in collaboration with the architectural duo Francisco Rivas and Rodrigo Messina, which brings together accessibility and permanence devices conceived as a constitutive part of the work. The intervention reorganizes the reception area: the door and frame were moved to allow for full opening (180°); benches and stools were distributed to accommodate rest; and cushions on the outdoor benches extend the experience to the surroundings.

The radical nature of the proposal is reflected in the institutional occupation: the side of the staircase, which leads to a second floor inaccessible to people with disabilities, was converted into a small library of Crip theory. “During the exhibition, Ateliê397 agreed to render the upper floor inoperable, suspending its use as a projection room to make the architectural limitation explicit instead of concealing it. And, as an external development, the project includes the production and donation of custom-made mobile ramps for neighboring cultural spaces in the village, prompting the circuit to collectively consider its accessibility conditions,” Caffé points out.

The project aligns with contemporary debates that seek visibility without capture, where the work operates through sensation, rhythm, and bodily micro-events that are not reduced to an "explanatory" image or easily consumable content. It is an approach that recognizes access as aesthetics and disability as a diagnosis of space and norms. In this way, curatorship and exhibition design become an active part of the work. Texts in Braille, audio description, and photo-tactile guides accompany the exhibition, whose operation and mediation incorporate the hiring of people with disabilities, respecting different circulation times.

Furthermore, all the devices in the exhibition were made with simple and low-cost materials, affirming the possibility of creating welcoming spaces even in architectural designs that do not fully comply with legal regulations.

Body in negotiation: video, sculpture and photography

In previous works, Sigulem invited the viewer to adjust to certain scales, as in the series Jeito de Corpo (2024). In this solo exhibition, the artist places her own body at the center of the experience. Different works explore this shift in perspective, sometimes proposing situations in which the public is led to reorient their spatial perception, and sometimes accompanying the artist in gestures of continuous negotiation with space.

The videos are based on reinterpretations of historical performances, created from the artist's body and traversed by issues of gender and power. The actions do not seek fidelity to the original gesture, but operate as a situated translation, in which each movement bears the mark of a necessary adjustment. The camera follows the process without correcting the deviation, allowing the flaw and the effort to remain visible.

This is the case with the previously unreleased series Ramps (2025), a set of twenty photographs derived from the video-performance Painting (Retouching) (based on Francis Alÿs). In the video, the artist marks points on the streets of São Paulo with yellow paint where access ramps should exist, highlighting the lack of accessibility in the urban landscape. The photographs isolate these gestures and traces, transforming the performative action into images that record the friction between body, city, and infrastructure.

By adopting the height of a wheelchair user's field of vision as a reference point, the exhibition shifts the normative scale of the exhibition space and introduces a regime of perception in which the body does not adjust to the architecture, but rather the architecture becomes an index of its limitations.

A sculpture punctuates the space, testing the boundaries between function and failure and questioning structures designed to guide movement. In an installation, a video dedicated to the image of falling articulates its repetition as a physical and symbolic experience. Together, the works suggest that every trajectory is traversed by detours, pauses, and negotiations, and that the shortest distance between two points rarely presents itself as a straight line.

The exhibition "Manual for Traveling the Shortest Distance from One Point to Another" is part of the "Jeito de Corpo" project, funded by the PNAB CULTURE FUNDING CALL NO. 25/2024, from the Secretariat of Culture, Economy and Creative Industries, State of São Paulo.

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Exhibition | A guide to traveling the shortest distance from one point to another
From January 24th to February 28th
Wednesday to Saturday, from 14pm to 18pm