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) . These works are dedicated to the collection and investigation of similarities and singularities. Some focus on things that are supposed or expected to be identical, but end up being slightly different. Others focus on things that ought to be different but somehow obey similar principles. The photographs examine these issues on a temporal basis, for instance depicting groups of houses that were built to be the same but have been changed over the years according to the tastes, needs, and capabilities of their inhabitants. A playful, poetic quality underlies these displacements and juxtapositions, signifying subtle transformations of the everyday.
Carla Zaccagnini combines historical research with a variety of media and techniques. From drawing to installation, performance, text, video, exhibition curating, and written criticism, Zaccagnini investigates cultural exchange and social displacement, as well as the transformation of the symbolic value of images in contemporary culture. Zaccagnini views these multiple activities as mutually constitutive forms of inquiry that overlap to form a holistic, conceptually driven art practice. Often working by recontextualizing existing objects and ideas, she prompts viewers to question the limitations of language and representation, the fallibility of perception, and the construction of knowledge. Zaccagnini is part of a generation of Latin American artists that have addressed the political history of the continent and, more specifically but not exclusively, the history of Brazil. Having delved into the history of slavery, the influence of European aesthetics in Brazilian art, and its assimilation by indigenous cultures, Zaccagnini uses art as a conceptual instrument to undo the construction of history and the production of knowledge.
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...
Adição por subtração 4 (Addition by Subtraction, 2010) is an intervention into the white cube with both beautiful and intimidating results...
450 Hayes Street (excavation site) by Marcelo Cidade is a large scale photograph documenting the artist’s excavation of a parking lot located at 450 Hayes Street in San Francisco, a former section of the city’s Central freeway and current condominium site...
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...
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...
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...
The series West (Flag 1), West (Flag 3), and West (Flag 6) continues da Cunha’s ongoing exploration of the form’s various vertical, horizontal, and diagonal stripes...
Relying on repetition and repurposed materials, Soares works to interrogate time—its measurement, its passing, and its meaning...
Cinthia Marcelle’s video work Automóvel (2012) re-edits the mundane rhythms of automotive traffic into a highly compelling and seemingly choreographed meditation on sequence, motion, and time...
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...
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...
On Fire by Runo Lagomarsino comprises twenty pieces of parchment, each of which has had the contours and map of Brazil burned in stages...
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...
In Laissez-Faire (Rainbow Flag) da Cunha has turned a beach towel into both a painting and a flag...
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...
Mapa-Mundi BR (postal) is a set of wooden shelves holding postcards that depict locations in Brazil named for foreign countries and cities...