05.28 — 06.29.21
Malba presents the ninth and final exhibition in the program “History as Rumor,” dedicated to the performance Xifópagas Capilares Entre Nós by Brazilian artist Tunga (1952, Palmares, Brazil – 2016, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil).
Inspired by a Norse myth that tells of the effect two girls have on the behavior of the inhabitants of a village, this action focuses on two teenagers who have their long hair tied together and who appear unexpectedly in the exhibition space and then walk through it. The work was created in 1984 and has since been presented at various Brazilian and international institutions, including Tate Modern in London in 2018, which also added the piece to its collection.
Curator Jochen Volz says: "Xifópagas Capilares Entre Nós is undoubtedly one of Tunga's best-known and most enigmatic works. Here, the artist evokes a very particular image, primordial in the imagination of viewers, stimulated both by seeing the performance, reading the text about its mythological origins, observing a photo documenting the work, or hearing a rumor about it. There are very few works in the history of art with such capacity for synthesis, timelessness, and poetic force. The motif of the eternal search for the twin is as universal as the fear of separation. We seem to recognize an ancient myth in this work, even though we have never before heard of or seen the twins."
Data Sheet
Curator: Jochen Volz
Testigo: Catherine Lampert, Julia y Diana Hammar
Rumoristas: Beverly Adams, Luisa Duarte, Laura Lima
Institutional Colaborator: Pinacoteca de São Paulo
Thanks to: Instituto Tunga, Rio de Janeiro
Opening conversation
Participants: Jochen Volz y Luisa Duarte
Presents: Gabriela Rangel
Thursday, May 27 at 6:00 p.m.
Institutional Colaborator:
Main support:
History as Rumor
Multiple movement performances
On the occasion of the celebration of its nineteenth anniversary, Malba presents La historia como rumor (History as Rumor), an annual program of online exhibitions created by Gabriela Rangel, Malba’s artistic director, with the aim of documenting and contextualizing a set of performances that took place at different times and in various places in the Americas and the Caribbean, in a historical transition period marked by the end of the Cold War and the advent of the internet.
A collaboration between guest curators and various international museums and institutions is the starting point to present a research project every month that will allow us to revisit a series of actions and performances that became production milestones of their time, and that will engage in a direct or indirect conversation with problem areas of the present. A video record of testimonies from spectators who witnessed those performances, and of experts from different disciplines giving their opinion on them, will create an archive that will make up the oral history for each of the projects.
The selection of artists and specific actions respond to a very broad framework that began to be debated regionally in 1981, at the First Latin American Colloquium on Non-Objectual Art and Urban Art at the Museum of Modern Art in Medellin, Colombia. The starting point of the selection also understands the historical transmission of performances as a rumor, defined as a multiple movement in a diagram sketched by Ulises Carrión, Mexican poet and visual artist based in Amsterdam. Both frameworks propose the reconfiguration of a set of works in a period of time influenced by the conceptualisms that began globally since the 1960s.
The exhibition of each performance includes a record of the action, along with vast archival material, such as photographs, films, storyboards, press clippings and documents that aid the reconstruction of the piece and its context. It also includes an interview with someone who has witnessed the performance and four video testimonies by leading specialists from different disciplines. The choice of the various voices and materials is intended to recontextualize these performances in the present as contemporary expressions.
The series La historia como rumor will be available until September 21st, 2021 along with Malba’s 20th Anniversary celebration.
