The best of the Biennial exhibition in Serralves – publico

                 

                         
                     

                         
                     

                         

                 

 
                         

The relationship between exposure that was in the Bienal de São Paulo and now shown in Serralves, in what is the first European roaming the Brazilian biennial, “is like a wine and spirits: they have different flavors, but we see the connection, “said the Scot Charles Esche, one of the curators of How (…) things that are not , which on Friday was inaugurated at the Serralves Museum, where it will remain until 17 January next year.

 

Featuring 28 artists and collectives, 75 of which could be seen in São Paulo between September and December 2014, the assembly of the exhibition in Serralves involved show about a third of the works in an area ten times smaller. A restriction that has proved positive: “I think the taste here is more intense,” says the PUBLIC Charles Esche, one of three curators – the others are Galit Eilat and Oren Sagiv – responsible for selecting works now displayed in Oporto.

With a very strong social dimension and an obvious desire to denounce the most negative effects of globalization while imagines and thinks other possible exposure “significantly tells the same story in Brazil and Portugal,” also says Esche but noting that the need to adapt the pieces to Siza Vieira architecture generated dialogues between certain works that did not exist in St. Paul.

The curator also confesses not have been “fully satisfied” with the work that resulted some of orders placed for the São Paulo Biennial, and note that the trustees now have the ability to choose from pieces that already knew.

The text Esche and Eilat wrote for the book Serralves edited for accompany the exhibition – which departs somewhat from the conventional catalog, including not only critical texts, but heterogeneous contributions from several of the artists represented – states with unusual clarity the conviction that art can even help change the world.

Buy this early twenty-first century, “an era of disappointment,” the curators note that “opposition movements are gaining legal force, but have yet to present a convincing alternative narrative” and that, for now, “indecision and fear dominate everything and everyone.” But admit there is reason to hope that a “great transformation” will “occur sooner or later,” which would make “urgent” exist, they argue, “imagination’s ability to prepare the ground,” something that “art in its can perform better. “

Petition to the Pope
One of the most alluring piece in this exhibition, with its mix of criticism and humor, it is err God , an installation of the Argentine collective Etcétera that part of the work of León Ferrari and uses some of the pieces of this iconoclastic artist disappeared in 2013. Ferrari was censored in Argentina by the then Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio, the current Pope.

In a room surrounded by allusive images to the devastation of natural resources in Latin America, a red bench with phones allows visitors to listen to God’s conversations with the Pope, Angela Merkel and several other parties. An idea inspired by a Ferrari book in which he clung biblical passages to newspaper reports and other texts, creating unexpected dialogues.

A window exposes the fun objects created by Ferrari, which combine an aesthetic bazaar toys the messages sometimes quite violent, a Jesus driving a tank to Hitler caught in one of those classic traps that appear in the cartoon Tom and Jerry or Speedy Gonzales.

On a wall, are collected signatures for a petition to be delivered to the pope Francisco, asking for the abolition of Hell. Again, it is to recover an original initiative of Ferrari, who wrote twice to John Paul II to ask him that extinguished that place of eternal torment. Federico Zukerfeld, one of Etcetera collective elements, argues that in a world where torture is still so present, the Pope should decide whether religion is “a device of war and torture or a source of liberation.”

The idea of ​​creating things (yet) exist, are well represented on the first room of the exhibition route, where a Chinese work Qiu Zhijen- huge maps that not only cartografam places, but also ideas and emotions – coexists with a resulting installation of the joint work of children and adults involved in a project with Palestinian refugees and residents of a Brazilian favela.

In another room, a suspended forest acrylic figuring a CIA document filing on the Brazilian dictatorship, designed the Chilean Voluspa Jarpa, sets the tone to various works related to the colonial past and the heritage of Latin American dictatorships

With a strong Brazilian delegation, but also including artists from various backgrounds. – from Argentina to Chile and Colombia, Portugal and Spain to Italy or Poland, Israel and Palestine to Turkey or China, this is an exhibition that deals openly with conflict of this, the heritage of destruction in the Middle East to the Russian-Ukrainian tensions . But Charles Esche prefers to speak of his “social” dimension, “not so much politics,” at least in the strictest sense, because, remember, the history of violence in Latin America is not unique to right prerogative.

Significantly, the route ends up in the Hell , under an Yael Bartena film which shows the unveiling of a replica of Solomon’s temple in São Paulo, built by the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God to welcome stones Israel.