Exhibition "Mira Schendel – waiting for the letter to form"

Ministry of Culture, Nubank e Tomie Ohtake Institute is pleased to announce Mira Schendel – wait for the lyrics to form, exhibition curated by Galciani Neves e Paulo Miyada, which explores the presence of graphic signs, letters and the word language in the artistic production of Mira Schendel (1919–1988). Bringing together more than 250 works, including paintings, monotypes, drawings, notebooks, graphic objects and an installation, the exhibition is divided into seven sections, inviting the public to immerse themselves in the presence of words in Mira's artistic production and their interconnections. The exhibition will open on October 24, concurrently with the exhibition Carlito Carvalhosa – A meia do dobro.

Mira Schendel – waiting for the letter to form is part of the biannual program word word word, which began with the project Poetry in Presence – Between Scenes, Slam, Spoken Word and Rap, and which will also feature the launch of the publication Essay Notebook 2: Word. This exhibition is sponsored by Nubank, through the Ministry of Culture, via the Culture Incentive Law, the National Culture Support Program and the Federal Government – ​​Brazil, Union and Reconstruction.

Recognized as one of the most significant artists of 1949th century Brazilian art, Mira Schendel was born in Zurich, Switzerland, of Jewish, Czech, German and Italian ancestry. Due to anti-Semitic persecution, she fled to Brazil in 1960, where she lived and produced much of her work, engaging with Concrete Poetry, Neoconcretism and the artistic experiments of the 1970s and XNUMXs.

Neves and Miyada point out that Schendel challenged herself by seeking ways to give meaning to the ephemeral. It was in one of the artist’s manuscripts, for example, that the curators found the title of the exhibition, “waiting for the letter to form” and from there they also extracted the following excerpt, present in the curatorial text: “The sequence of letters on the paper imitates time, without being able to truly represent it. They are simulations of lived time, and do not capture the experience of the irretrievable, which characterizes this time. The texts that I drew on paper can be read and reread, something that time cannot. They fix, without immortalizing, the fluidity of time.”

The curators conceived the installation in seven sections, fluidly supported by the artist’s chronology. In “Arrival in Brazil and the Word,” the section that opens the exhibition, the public sees the journey from schematic representations of objects to abstract compositions and experiments with graphic elements. Highlights include works from the 1960s, when Mira integrates labels and texts into her work, bringing the written word to the center of her compositions. In “Writing-drawing structuring spaces,” there are drawings made with India ink and charcoal that show the relationship between word and space, combining letters, graphic signs, and calligraphic gestures. According to the curators, Haroldo de Campos described Mira’s “writing-art,” in which the graphic sign becomes an aesthetic issue and a way of fabricating spaces.

In “The Spiral Word”, there are works that feature words in different languages, especially Italian and German, languages ​​that the artist inherited from her parents, which appear alongside Portuguese, the official language of Brazil. For the curators, “This diversity of expressions and pronunciations makes the word in the artist’s work effective as a kind of event of enunciation of something, as if writing/drawing the letters and their decoding made what is stated there come true. The word thus establishes a situation”, they conclude.

The next section, “Art: encounter with the corporeal”, highlights the Toquinhos, both those made in rice paper and those in acrylic. Among the homonymous series, the Letraset decals are the common element. In “Refluir de páginas fechas e abertas” (Reflow of closed and open pages), there are the notebooks by Mira Schendel. The curatorship points out that “These works – made, for the most part, in 1971 – are composition exercises on bound, perforated, stapled or glued paper, like brochures or simple clusters of pages. The artist used hundreds of sets of sheets, of many dimensions, which, understood in their sequence, form a journey through time and space”.

Completing the exhibition are “Monotypes and graphic objects”, two of the artist’s best-known series and “Storied waves of probability, a whisper”, which, as the name suggests, presents the installation “Storied waves of probability”, her largest work.

In parallel with the Mira Schendel exhibition, the Tomie Ohtake Institute is opening Carlito Carvalhosa – a meia do dupla, the first major retrospective of the artistic production of Carlito Carvalhosa (1961–2021). With around 150 works dating from 1984 to 2021, the exhibition is jointly curated by Ana Roman, Lúcia Stumpf, Luis Pérez-Oramas and Paulo Miyada.

Public Program

These exhibitions are complemented by a public program of meetings, workshops and experiences, with programming updated on the Institute’s website and social media throughout the exhibition period. At the opening, on October 25, there will be a program designed for teachers from public and private schools, as well as for arts professionals, with the participation of the exhibition curators and educators from the institution. On October 26, the public is invited to watch a performance by the duo Teia-Teia, a musical partnership between Inês Terra (voice) and Júlia Telles (teremin). The duo researches the relationship between early electronic devices and voices, through improvised and compositional processes. Teia moves between harmonic and noisy sounds, exploring the possibilities of the body through interventions, graphic scores and field recordings. On November 1, the general public is invited to participate in the debate Os echoes da palavra (The echoes of the word), with the presence of artists Livia Aquino, Lenora de Barros and researcher Maria Carvalhosa. On November 2nd, there will be three workshops on different text genres: Invented Menus, with the participation of journalist and gastronomic critic Luiza Fecarotta; Book Dedication – Books that remind me of you, with the participation of researcher Rosa Couto; and Comedy Techniques and Our Responsibility with Words, led by actress and comedian Karina Sbruzzy. On November 21st, there will also be an audio description workshop, From Word to Image, with artist DEF Isafora Ifanger, and on January 14th, the zine workshop, Mira Schendel's Diary, led by artist and educator Léo Daruma. Participation in the events requires prior registration, via the Institute's website and subject to availability.

Friends program

The Instituto Tomie Ohtake Friends Program aims to bring the public closer to one of the most emblematic art spaces in the city of São Paulo. In addition to providing support, Amigo Tomie will be part of a community connected to art, will have special benefits and unique experiences. There are three categories of support, contributing to new exhibitions, educational programs, annual budget and maintenance of the Institute. And a new feature for Nubank users, sponsor of the Mira Schendel exhibition – wait for the letter to form: The institution's customers have a 25% discount on any support category, while Ultraviolet customers have a 50% discount.

Service
Exhibition | Mira Schendel – wait for the lyrics to form
From October 25th to February 02th
Tuesday to Sunday, from 11pm to 19pm