Nthis saturday, the Nonada ZN gallery opens a collective, in Penha, Rio de Janeiro, with the title fragment I: gantry wind, bringing together works by artists Iah Bahia, Loren Minzú, Siwaju Lima, curated by Clarissa Diniz. In all, around 32 works will be exhibited, a set of sculptures, installations, prints, videos and objects, part of which has never been seen before. As the title suggests, the exhibition is part of a project by the curator, divided into two stages.
According to Clarissa, the criterion for selecting Iah, Loren and Siwaju came from the desire to imagine “how their poetics already intersected, how they already had some interlocution, and to understand that this dialogue could be deepened with the opportunity of this experience in a collective studio” , it says, à arte!brasileiros.
“The desire to bring them together came more from the interest in seeing them working together, creating together, sharing their processes. This exhibition is currently an occupation of this former factory [of the Marilan lingerie brand, where Nonada ZN is currently installed], but it does not start as an exhibition, but a kind of collective studio, for an experimental creation process, with the materials available here in the building and shared by the artists.”
The meetings began in March, when Clarissa articulated, with the artists, various creative activities, so that they could develop their projects and explore their poetics, “carrying out site specific investigations and sharing their knowledge and desires in a collective process of creation, criticism and interlocution”, explains the curator in a statement from the gallery.
“The three of them have a repertoire of material that is quite unique. Siwaju has a very expressive work with iron and also with engravings. The Iah, with fabric and paper. Already Loren, with earth, clay, branches, organic, natural materials. So the set of materials they were already working with was added to those available here at the factory, elements impregnated with a lot of history”, says the curator.
Clarissa and the artists undertook investigations around “the imaginaries, policies and forms of the wind, of movement, of the void, of the hollow, of the reverse”. In the second stage of the project, fragments II, the research will have as a guiding thread the ideas of trap, defense, spell, armor. The same artists will participate in the new phase, again taking advantage of the place they occupy.
In this first stage, the artist Iah Bahia (1993 São Gonçalo, RJ) will show works created from her practice and research, which involves interdisciplinary experiments with “fabric-matter, garbage-matter and other substantial elements collected in the urbanized territory” . In the works, Iah underlines the tensions of the inhabited space.
Loren Minzú (1999, São Gonçalo, RJ) will reveal the fruits of his investigation into the “production of images linked to temporal, spatial and bodily notions”. It will present a set of audiovisual works, installations and sculptures with vegetables, minerals and artifacts, among others. Minzú articulates, in his creations, luminosity and darkness, among other issues.
Siwaju Lima (1997 São Paulo, SP), whose production focuses on the relationship of time through the reuse of donated or found iron pieces, will exhibit creations that have a direct relationship with cast sculpture. Siwaju explores the “possible relationships between the material and the symbols it incorporates, between the object and its surroundings, between the sculptural body and space, and between the work and our bodies”, says the Nonada statement.
In her curatorial text, Clarissa Diniz highlights that in fragment I: gantry wind the public will not be "in the face of extractive aesthetic projects within which materials are instrumentalized as resources to be appropriated by authoritarian hands and gestures”, he says. "On the contrary, Gantry Wind unfolds in poetic exercises whose ethics implies bending, caressing, oxidizing or touching materialities as complicit bodies with which we share secrets, knowledge, desires and curses.”
