Braga’s video work Provisão (2009) opens with a still shot of a clearing in a forest, shoots of grass emerging from a muddy brown patch of seemingly dry and barren earth. As the camera fades to black, the viewer hears the repeated sound of a shovel striking dirt. The camera fades back to the clearing and zooms in on a shirtless man digging up the ground. The hole grows wider and deeper as he digs, becoming an almost crater-like expanse filled knee-deep with ground water. The man emerges from the hole and begins to chop the base of a tree next to the hole, hacking away with deep and repetitive strokes until the tree begins to fell and eventually collapse into the massive cavity beneath. A symbol of life and growth, the tree’s collapse is achieved solely by pushing one’s strength to an absolute limit. He emerges from the hole again and begins to shovel the dirt back in, burying the tree under a seemingly endless and inexhaustible pile of earth until it is fully covered, its branches and leaves submerged. The metaphors here between destruction and nature are difficult to ignore. At once both poetic and unsettling, Provisão offers a cautionary tale about the harmful impacts of human interventions on the environment.
Born in Manaus in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, Brazilian-born artist Rodrigo Braga confronts the natural world head-on. His video and media-based work are centered on these encounters that place him at the focus point of the work, between the human condition and the animal kingdom. Braga’s performative practice reveals itself through photography that deals with his relationship with landscape and animals. For Braga, the body is the medium of which he exposes the limits. Power dynamics, weakness, life, death, struggle, submission, domination and masculinity come to play in his practice of photography, video and installation. He tests his limits with any beast, exposing carnal instincts with a calibrated approach. Braga has exhibited internationally including the 30th São Paulo Bienal, The Imminence of Poetics (São Paulo, 2012); From the Margin to the Edge, Somerset House (London, 2012); Mythologies, Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris, 2011); and Giant by nature, IVAM – Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderna (Valencia, 2011).
Clarissa Tossin’s film Ch’u Mayaa responds to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (constructed 1919–21) in Los Angeles, an example of Mayan Revival architecture...
In Fordlândia Fieldwork (2012), Tossin documents the remains of Henry Ford’s rubber enterprise Fordlândia, built in 1928 in the Brazilian Amazon to export cultivated rubber for the booming automobile industry...
Yoneda’s Japanese House (2010) series of photographs depicts buildings constructed in Taiwan during the period of Japanese occupation, between 1895 and 1945...
While his works can function as abstract, they are very much rooted in physicality and the possibilities that are inherent in the materials themselves...
This series of photographs, Sobre la igualdad y las diferencias: casas gemelas (On Equality and Differences: Twin Houses) , taken in Havana in 2005, belongs to a wider group of works that the artist has been developing over many years, generally titled Bifurcaciones y encrucijadas (Forking Paths and Crossroads) ...
Rudolph Schindler’s designs, part of a practice he called “Space Architecture,” marry interior with exterior and space with light...
Collectors’ Favorites is an episode of local cable program from the mid-1990s in which ordinary people were invited to present their personal collections—a concept that in many ways anticipates current reality TV shows and internet videos...
Meireles, whose work often involves sound, refers to Sal Sem Carne (Salt Without Meat) as a “sound sculpture.” The printed images and sounds recorded on this vinyl record and it’s lithographed sleeve describe the massacre of the Krahó people of Brazil...
Yo también soy humo (I am also smoke) is a 16mm film that has been digitized to video...
This series of photographs reflects Marcelo Cidade’s incessant walks or drifting through the city and his chance encounters with a certain street poetry like the Surrealists or Situationists before him...
Relying on repetition and repurposed materials, Soares works to interrogate time—its measurement, its passing, and its meaning...
This series of photographs reflects Marcelo Cidade’s incessant walks or drifting through the city and his chance encounters with a certain street poetry like the Surrealists or Situationists before him...
De sino à sina (From Bell to Fate) is a six-channel sound installation by Carla Zaccagnini exploring the relationship between modern Brazil and its colonial past...
Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U...
Adição por subtração 4 (Addition by Subtraction, 2010) is an intervention into the white cube with both beautiful and intimidating results...
His Deck Painting I recalls the simplistic stripes of conceptual artist Daniel Buren, or the minimal lines of twentieth century abstract painting, but is in reality a readymade, fashioned from repurposed fabric of deck chairs...
Invited in 2007 to the Museum Folkwang in Essen (Germany), Simon Starling questioned its history: known for its collections and particularly for its early engagement in favor of modern art (including the acquisition and exhibition of works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse), then destroyed during the Second World War, the museum was pillaged for its masterpieces of ‘degenerate art’ by the nazis...
Mapa-Mundi BR (postal) is a set of wooden shelves holding postcards that depict locations in Brazil named for foreign countries and cities...