06.26 — 08.20.2015
An historical view on the Videobrasil collection
Opening: Thursday, June 25
Curator: Agustín Pérez Rubio
This video exhibition revisits polemic and conflict-ridden historical events from the personal perspectives of major international artists such as Akram Zaatari and Walid Raad (Lebanon); Coco Fusco (USA); Bouchra Khalili (Morocco); León Ferrari (Argentina); and Rosãngela Rennó, Carlos Motta, and Jonathas de Andrade (Brazil).
At the invitation of Solange Farkas—curator, founder, and director of the Associacao Cultural Videobrasil—Agustín Pérez Rubio, Artistic Director of MALBA, undertook an exhaustive study of the Videobrasil collection in order to choose eighteen works with highly political and social content.
Whether addressing the Portuguese “conquest" of Brazil, the military coup in Chile, the 9-11 attacks in the United States, the massacre in Tiananmen Square China, or the civil war in Lebanon, there are many ways to relate—or to try to erase—stories kept alive thanks to the sensibility and work of countless artists from those regions.
Uneresable Memories helps to restore the memory of events and conflicts whose interpretation is often formulated in the official versions of the “winners,” events and conflicts that, nonetheless, live on in personal narratives that tell a different story rendered visible through art. The exhibition was first presented from August 31 to November 30, 2014 at the SESC Pompeia in San Pablo.
Tours
At MALBA, the exhibition begins with the conquest of Brazil in Vera Cruz (2000) by Rosângela Rennó, which alerts viewers and reminds them that everything told is cultural fiction. It continues with masterful documentaries about the Wajãpi and Zo’é indigenous peoples by Vincent Carelli and Dominique Galois. Added to these are the coup d'état in Chile and the territorial conflict with Bolivia, treated ironically in a fiction entitled Projeto Pacifico (2010) by Jonathas de Andrade. The imperialist policies of the United States are present in the video by León Ferrari and Ricardo Pons, Casa Blanca (2005). The memory of the Tiananmen Square massacre appears in Liu Wei's work Unforgettable Memory (2009), and one of the great conflicts of the 20th century, South African apartheid, is addressed in Dan Halter's work, which uses a video clip to compare the musical habits of white and black youth. Towards the end of the collection, we encounter an important and tragic event in Latin America—the “Argentine corralito”—which emerges through the piece Lucharemos hasta anular la ley (2004) by Sebastian Diaz Morales.
At the Espacio Cultural de la Embajada de Brasil, we find a reflection on the slave trade from Africa to the countries of southern Latin America by Ayrson Heráclito and Danillo Barata, who in a very poetic and almost performative way recover memories of journeys and seas crossed with suffering. Added to this are the agrarian struggles of the early 20th century in Brazil, by Enio Staub, the political struggles of the Sataré-Mawé indigenous people against the French oil multinational Elf Aquitaine, by Aurélio Michiles, and the recording of Walid Raad's reading performance on the war in Lebanon and the archive of The Atlas Group. The acts of abuse in Guantanamo are recorded in Coco Fusco's performance, Bare Life Study #1 (2005). The sobbing in Kenyan artist Ingrid Mwangi's performance, in a moving 2005 performance at the Videobrasil Festival, is revived with enormous force in My Possession. Finally, contemporary racial conflict appears in the work of Luiz de Abreu, winner of last year's Videobrasil Festival with his performance entitled O samba do crioulo doido (2013), in which he explores the current iconography of the black male body.
In the Exhibition Hall of the Torcuato Di Tella University, the war in Lebanon is represented once again in two works: Rabih Mroué's video, Face A Face B(2002), which deals with immigration, memory, and personal affections derived from the conflict; and Akram Zaatari's video entitled In this House (2004). Likewise, the tragedy that struck the United States on September 11, 2001, is revisited through the eyes of an immigrant, Carlos Motta. Finally, the mass immigration of North Africans to Europe and their terrible journeys and experiences are conveyed to us through testimonies in Bouchra Khalili's installation, Four Selected Videos from the Mapping Journey Project (2008-2011).
