Contemporary Art Paradox(es): Dialogues between MAC USP's and Paço das Artes's Collections
Ana Magalhães and Priscila Arantes
Curators
In this show that is a collaboration between MAC USP and Paço das Artes, we took as principle to cross both collections-understood here as comprising documentation and the archive that this institution created from its schedule of exhibitions and its contribution ti the memory of contemporary art, which are central issues at MAC USP as well. In this dialogue, we sought to put side by side and follow artists who made Paço's history and are present in MAC USP's collection. Choosing Regina Silveira's work as guiding principle for the selection of the other participating artists and the issues raised by the exhibition merged not only towards this shared institutional history but also towards the matters that both curatorial teams have been raising in regards to contemporary production.
Paradoxo do santo (A Saint's Paradox) by Regina Silveira is the starting point of this exhibition work. The installation was originally created for the Museo del Barrio in New York City for a show in which the artist participated in 1994, having been added to MAC USP's collection soon after. The artist's proposal is what she herself calls an "environmental installation," in which she opposes a cheap image of a saint-Saint James Apostle or Santiago Matamoros, Spain's and the New World's military patron-to a large, distorted shadow projected by a famous equestrian monument dedicated to Duque de Caxias-the Brazilian army's patron-conceived by the celebrated Modernist sculptor Victor Brecheret. The artist was thus reflecting on the conflicts of domination in Latin America, a giant subjugated to the Portuguese-Spanish powers, which to this day lives under a regime of coloniality. Inverting the signals, with the shadow of the classically shaped equestrian monument that is part of Brazilian heritage and history, and the small cheap image of the saint as a reference of the center, Silveira points to the contradictions of those power relationships and to the conflicting history between these two territories.
From this installation, and the effect of the shadow and its meanings, we unfold to a selection of works by Regina Silveira that, from then on, reflect on other neighboring issues. Inclusões em São Paulo (Inclusions in São Paulo), the Interferências (Interferences) series, Infernus, Enigmas, and Anamorfas (Amorphs; a print album that was her graduation work at USP) are part of the exhibition. There is a wide range of materials that the artist used to conceive these works at different times in her career. As well as distorted shadows being integral parts of many of them, Silveira revisits in them the issue of the art museum today, of how it deals with artistic propositions that demand other forms of documentation, display, and conservation. She also, necessarily, tackles the issue of memory and of how narratives are built within our institutions. The idea of territory, of map, and the role of the city in this key are also hot topics in her works exhibited here. Thus, Regina Silveira puts herself within some a poetics that comes close to activist, insurgent issues, or casts light on them. The prints in the Anamorfas album are, finally, a kind of synthesis between the paradoxical idea of the shadow and its real menace, or potential for violence, since the shadows, in this case, of cutting objects; even though commonplace in domestic environments, they can hurt and even kill.
The museum, territory, activism, and violence are issues that guided the selection of works from the other artists. The museum and its paradox are revisited in propositions by Fabiano Gonper, Felipe Cama, and Antoni Muntadas. Territory and its conflicts emerge in the works by Giselle Beiguelman, Gilbertto Prado, Rosângela Rennó, Alex Flemming, and Nazareno Rodrigues. Activism and militant poetics are present in works by Eduardo Kac and Tadeu Jungle. Violence is inherent to works by Thiago Honório, Fernando Piola, and Hudinilson Jr. These constellations are not cores or rigid themes in the exhibition, but they form contact nets, one juxtaposed over the other. In the words of Regina Silveira herself, they are artists who share the same "fur" with her, without being of the same species.
The exhibition does not have linear or chronological organisation, but it aims at fostering dialogue between artists within these paradoxes that contemporary art currently proposes.
© 2018 Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo