Arpedia

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. The sound installation is made from a recording of the bell at Capela de Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Homens Brancos, a Baroque-style chapel that is one of the first chapels in Ouro Preto (previously Vila Rica) in the region of Minas Gerais. The work references the execution of José da Silva Xavier (1746-1792), also known as “Tiradentes”.

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Sobre la igualdad y las diferencias: casas gemelas

Carla Zaccagnini

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.

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Sal Sem Carne

Cildo Meireles

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. The piece draws on Meireles’s first-hand contact with many indigenous groups through his father’s work with the Indian Protection Service. The recordings on the LP contain narrative accounts of massacres of native peoples, as well as indigenous music and rituals.

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Fordlândia Fieldwork

Clarissa Tossin

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. When his rubber trees died from disease and his primarily indigenous workforce revolted, his enterprise went busts within a few short years. Ford never faulted his own planning, but instead blamed the “inhospitable” Brazilian landscape.

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Two Eyes Two Mouth

Erika Verzutti

Made in cast bronze, Two Eyes Two Mouths provokes a strong sense of fleshiness as if manipulated by the hand of the artist pushing her fingers into wet clay or plaster to create gouges that represent eyes, mouths and the female reproductive organ. Equally, there is a semblance of fruits—their succulence and fragility. While the work is sensual, the matte bronze surface refuses any expectation of softness.

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Provisão

Rodrigo Braga

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.

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Deck Painting I

Alexandre da Cunha

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. Alexandre da Cunha reinvents found objects in surprising ways that combine the material characteristics of Arte Povera with the concerns and techniques of painting. Da Cunha’s work often features flags—either as a found material per se or as a constructed form—that reflect the artist’s interest in issues of nationality, governmental politics, allegiance, and culture.

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Glaze (Savana)

Alexandre da Cunha

Glaze (Savana) (2005) is an assemblage of found materials: a car wheel, a tire, and a wooden plinth of the type traditionally used to display sculpture. It directly engages with the readymade, a subject that Alexandre de Cunha takes up throughout his practice, often inflecting it with a tropical, and South American–inspired materiality and painterly style that could potentially come across as a stereotype. Here, da Cunha transforms the component parts into a composition that highlights often-overlooked materials of artistic production and cultural mass-production.

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Laissez-Faire (Rainbow Flag)

Alexandre da Cunha

In Laissez-Faire (Rainbow Flag) da Cunha has turned a beach towel into both a painting and a flag. Where the printed surface of the towel originally served to enliven this commodity, here the pattern—now stretched and re-presented—suddenly refers to abstract painting’s promises of transcendence. And its crisply painted shape pulls the printed colors into the rectangularity of the canvas and, as da Cunha notes, the graphic iconicity of flags.

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West (Flag 1) (Flag 3) (Flag 6)

Alexandre da Cunha

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. Here, da Cunha overlays thick bars of color (blue, green, and red) on photographs of the ocean at sunset with surfers in floating on the horizon. The solid colors contrast with the fading colors reflected in the sunset, and the tilted orientation suggests a familiar California beach scene.

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Untitled

Fernanda Gomes

For this floor based work, Gomes has taken two lengths of bamboo and tied them together using linen thread. The work is self-supporting and stands in a crack or a hole in the floor. The work suggests precariousness, frailty as well as humanity through its verticality, and its gentle sinuous form, referencing perhaps the work of Giacometti.

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450 Hayes Street (excavation site)

Marcelo Cidade

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. The cut shape mirrors the precise shape of the Kadist gallery floor, where the concrete was relocated as part of his residency exhibition entitled Somewhere, Elsewhere, Anywhere, Nowhere. Through this concrete graft, Cidade inextricably links the city with artwork.

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Abuso de poder (Abuse of Power)

Marcelo Cidade

Marcelo Cidade’s sculpture Abuso de poder (Abuse of Power, 2010) is a mousetrap elegantly crafted in Carrara marble. Originally made for the Carrara Biennale in 2010, it re-creates the iconic form down to the piece of cheese waiting for an unsuspecting victim. In this sculpture, Cicade challenges the viewer’s participation and intervention into the artistic object.

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Eu preciso estar seguro de você 1 (I need to be sure of you 1)

Marcelo Cidade

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. He captures incongruities or everyday simplicity and highlights their suggestive power. The composition and framing of these interventions specially emphasizes the object of interest and the humor of the context.

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Adição por subtração - 4

Marcelo Cidade

Adição por subtração 4 (Addition by Subtraction, 2010) is an intervention into the white cube with both beautiful and intimidating results. The installation is a large rectangular frame created out of shards of clear and colored glass that protrude from the wall. The use of glass fragments is reminiscent of Robert Smithson’s sculpture Map of Glass (Atlantis) (1969), yet the concerns here are very different.

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Periquitos (Parakeets)

Marepe

Marepe (an acronym for Marcos Reis Peixoto) is from northeastern Brazil, and his sculptures and installations are steeped in its culture, traditions, festivals; his personal memories associated with his birthplace; and his interactions with European culture. Periquitos (Parakeets, 2005) is a cartoonlike giant television with a screen made of four vertical strips of blue, yellow, green, and red acetate. There is a recurring figure on the screen, which is taken from a photograph of the artist at age six.

Relying on repetition and repurposed materials, Soares works to interrogate time—its measurement, its passing, and its meaning. With copper wire stretched out across the room like a clothesline, Valeska Soares’ La Ligne du Temps creates a timeline out of fluttering, old book pages. Read upon the pages of this delicately wrought installation are linguistic approaches to time and its phenomonologies.

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Chu’u Mayaa

Clarissa Tossin

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. By re-appropriating the structure as a temple and imbuing it with a dance performance based on movements and postures found in ancient pottery and murals, the choreography takes its influence from the house’s design and the body positions on ancient Maya ceramics and buildings. A pulse, breathing, and a pre-Columbian clay flute are among the sounds on the soundtrack.

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Sunday (Domingo)

Rivane Neuenschwander

In this video, a parrot chews on seeds printed with punctuation marks. A radio on the shelf in the background broadcasts the news of an unfolding football match. As the game (and video) progresses, the bird eats all of the remaining punctuation.

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Automóvel

Cinthia Marcelle

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. Shot from an aerial vantage, the camera tracks the daily commute on a small stretch of concrete highway. The camera films the traffic below in short five-second excerpts before blacking out; time begins to collapse as the video shifts between scene, and the hours compress into minutes as daylight quickly turns into night.

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Mapa Mundi BR (postal)

Rivane Neuenschwander

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Mapa-Mundi BR (postal) is a set of wooden shelves holding postcards that depict locations in Brazil named for foreign countries and cities. When installed, viewers are invited to fill out and mail a postcard to any destination, an act which parallels the dissemination and global circulation of image, text, and the idea of place.

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London calendar

Rivane Neuenschwander

London calendar

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Westminster Agua Viva

Adriano Costa

Westminster Agua Viva is made from Westminster City Council(‘s) recycling bin bags, glued together, that the artist has painted and cut or cut and painted. Although, they hang on the wall they possess a strong sculptural quality as the fringes float away from the wall. This is part of a series of works that refer to Brazilian concrete and neo-concrete art as well as Arte Povera in a playful manner while demonstrating a strong identity of its own.

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O Africano

José Leonilson

O Africano (1984) is a large acrylic painting on canvas, made early in the artist’s career, and directly references both Leonilson’s artistic precursors and his desire to imagine and capture what it means to be Brazilian. It is about the importance for many Brazilians of their African ethnic and cultural heritage.

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Asking the Repentistas - Peneira & Sonhador - toremix my octopus works

Shimabuku

For the two-channel work Asking the Repentistas – Peneira & Sonhador – to remix my octopus works Shimabuku asked two Brazilian street singers to compose a ballad about his previous works with octopi (in which he created traditional Japanese ceramic vessels to catch octopi, with a fisherman who took him on his boat to test them out as we can see on one of the channel). In the Brazilian singers’ ballad, Shimabuku is transformed into a fisherman, the greatest fisherman in Japan, but a kindly fisherman who returns his catch to the sea. The artwork thus becomes facilitator for an interaction between different cultures and interpretations.

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Relevo

Luciano Figueiredo

Figueiredo’s succinct forms are rendered in bright hues of yellow, red, green, and blue, with white and black defining positive and negative spaces within the overall geometry. His Revelos are part painting, part relief, and part sculpture—they separate from the wall, creating spatial complexities within their bounds, and imply movement through the simplicity of their shapes. Though based on the shape of a simple square, each Revelo animates beyond that limitation, the folded and layered canvas sheets, the cuts and slices of contrasting paints creating movement from stasis.

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Estás vendo coisas

Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca

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.

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Pau-Brasil

Thiago Honório