Exhibition "The beginning of everything"

It is with great enthusiasm that the Carmo Johnson Projects Gallery presents the artist's first solo exhibition Naine Terena, “The beginning of everything”, opening on 17/08, Saturday, in its space located in the Alto de Pinheiros neighborhood, in São Paulo.

“The beginning of everything” has a sensitive curatorial essay written by Luciara Ribeiro, educator, researcher and curator, who mentions: “Naine Terena has worked with enormous contributions to the areas of curating, art criticism, education and public cultural management- educational. The Véxoa exhibition, we know, curated by Terena, exhibited in 2020, at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, became a landmark in the history of the institution and national arts, being recognized as one of the main recent exhibitions of contemporary indigenous productions. Unlike the place occupied in Véxoa, in the exhibition The beginning of everything, for the first time, the exhibition room will not be designed by Naine Terena to house works by other artists, but rather her artistic productions. Here, she brings us closer to a facet that is still little known, that of an artist.”

The exhibition allows us to learn a little about the beginning of Naine's artistic production, which began in the 1990s, based on crafts and performing arts. With these references, the artist prints both in the expography installation distributions of the works, inspired by encounters in the theater scene, and in the production of textile works, thus composing the following groups: The others; I am a tree; Brave new world and Before the world didn't exist.

Naine Terena makes a series of “Masks” (2024), using elements of the weaving technique and recoding them, to create textile works that materialize the 'others' - everything that inhabits this same time-space but is not identified or goes unnoticed by others. human eyes. Based on weaving processes common among Terena populations. Its braiding, different from that usually present in Terena textile manuality, does not seek the rigidity of the planned, the perfection, the framing and the calculated, on the contrary, it aims to highlight the notion of the imperfect, incomplete, insufficient, unfinished. There are loose lines, sinuous cuts, jumping points, where the remains of objects she found during the making process, discards thrown on the ground, rubbish are incorporated, signs of the disregard that current society has shown towards the health of the earth. In “Vovó” (2024), she deepens the contact between time cycles, between talking about now and listening to those who came before. With the wisdom imparted by the present time and the time of the elderly, the artist-researcher creates a grandmother crisscrossed with ribbons, making the danced gesture of her fingers the firmament for the presence of an exuberant grandmother, with enormous tentacles that elevate her at the same time. time to place it on the ground.

The series “I am a tree” is an experiment to produce a materiality of thoughts that connect humanity to everything that inhabits the animal, vegetable and cosmological world. Naine Terena often remembers that: It was late afternoon, in 2020, when I sat at the back of my house and took a photo of one of my plants. I started playing with it using countless filters, until in one of them I saw a small smile that gave me the thought: I am a tree! [Naine Terena]

The set 'Brave new world', or 'a necessary boot', is created from a set of seven cans of tuna, which contains images made from artificial intelligence, how technology recognizes 'wealth', poverty in Brazil , live well. The images seem to dialogue with real-life facts, such as 'tokenism', environmental racism, private leisure facilities, the impoverishment of a good portion of the population, reflecting whether it is time for a necessary boot.

Finally, the set of videos, “Before the world did not exist” makes an allusion to the many indigenous stories and cosmologies, using the name of the literary work written by Umusi Pãrõkumu and Tõrãmu Kehíri, indigenous people of the Amazon region, to address the creation of the world from an indigenous perspective and its relationships with the present and future. The images of coconut shells bring constellations, important to indigenous peoples, climate actions, colors and shapes that represent the world before and the world now. The world before this world, which our old trunks taught us to live in balance, and the world today, where relationships seem to have been broken for a large part of the population.

In “The beginning of everything”, the exhibition, we are faced with the possibility of thinking, seeing and reviewing our individual and collective existences, the knowledge acquired and preserved, the relationships and landscapes that surround us, the various paradoxes that we are unable to respond to and the mysteries of a world in motion. Placing reason, Cartesian thinking, rationality at a point of dialogue with cosmologies, with knowledge and counter-narratives, in the service of reflecting on what is happening now? What will it be like the day after tomorrow, tomorrow? Where is the beginning of it all?

Service
Exhibition | The beginning of everything
From the 17th of August to the 5th of October
Tuesday to Friday, 11am to 17pm, Saturdays by appointment