16 minutes
Originally commissioned for the 32nd Sao Paulo Biennial, the film Estás vendo coisas (You are seeing things) depicts the subculture of Brega music, a fusion of American Hip Hop, Brazilian techno and Caribbean reggaeton that emerged in North Eastern Brazil over the last decade. Part anthropological documentary and part musical the film speaks about the realities of Brazil with its enormous social and economic tensions.
Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca investigate how inherited aesthetic judgements differ across social classes in developing economies. Their collaborative practice operates between documentary and art, making use of familiar narrative forms in order to ask fundamental questions related to the actual social and political value of art, who it is made for and why. Creating series of photographs, videos, collage and installations they collect accepted forms of visual cultural production and bring to an equal level of presentation diverse and contradictory elements of reality in order to destabilize embedded hierarchies, evincing questions of taste, tradition, race, class, belonging and status not immediately visible.
Known But to God: The Dug Up, Dissected, and Disposed for the Sake of Medicine by Doreen Lynnette Garner is a small, suspended sculpture composed of glass, silicone, steel, epoxy putty, pearls, Swarovski crystals, and whiskey...
In Gradation (2011), nine raspberries lined up on a lichen-dotted rock progress from left to right, dark to light, plump and juicy to not-yet-ripe...
Hill of Poisonous Trees (three men) (2008) exemplifies the artist’s signature photo-weaving technique, in which he collects diverse found photographs—portraits of anonymous people, stills from blockbuster films, or journalistic images—cuts them into strips, and weaves them into new composition...