October 4 to December 7, 2003
Porto Alegre (RS) – www.Biennialmercosul.art.br
4th Mercosul Biennial Press Office- Porto Alegre:
General coordinator: Luciano Alfonso
Tel: (51) 3228-4074 – imprensa@Biennialmercosul.art.br
Brazilian and foreign press information - São Paulo:
General coordinator: – Edison Paes de Melo
Tel: (11) 3662-1660 / 3822-0070 – editcom@uol.com.br
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Contents
03
Introduction
05
Services
Concept
06 Odes to Origins
Lands
Exhibitions
11
The Delirium of Chimborazo
15
The Archaeology of the High Lands and Low
16
Genetic Archaeology
Artist of Honour
17 Saint Clair Cemin
Iconic Exhibition and National Representation
18 Brazil
21 Argentina
24 Bolivia
28 Chile
32 Paraguay
37 Uruguay
42 Mexico
47
49
51
History
Profiles
Sponsors
THE MERCOSUL BIENNIAL RETURNS IN ITS FOURTH EDITION AS THE
MOST IMPORTANT EVENT OF CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN ART
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The exhibition takes place in Porto Alegre (RS) from October 4 to December 7 with 76
artists from 13 countries.
The Mercosul Biennial Foundation is presenting the 4th Mercosul Visual Arts Biennial
between October 4 and December 7 2003. The theme of the exhibition is “Contemporary
Archaeology” occupying 5 spaces in the central district of Porto Alegre (RS): Usina do
Gasômetro Cultural Centre, Port Quayside, Rio Grande do Sul Museum of Art (MARGS), Rio
Grande do Sul Memorial and Santander Cultural.
Organised as the most representative event of contemporary Latin American Art, the Biennial
brings together 76 artists from 13 countries. The exhibition’s general curator Nelson Aguilar,
decided that this edition should have fewer artists in relation to previous years. “ The aim is to
concentrate the exhibition in order to better appreciate each work on show”, states Aguilar.
In addition to the countries that comprise the South American Common Market (Brazil,
Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay), and the guest country Mexico, the
biennial also brings together artists from countries such as Germany, Columbia, Cuba, The
United States, Peru and Venezuela, spread among three broad transnational exhibitions:
“The Delirium of Chimborazo”, “The Archaeology of the High Lands and Low Lands”
and “Genetic Archaeology”.
The Transversal Exhibition “The Delirium of Chimborazo” runs through all the Biennial
exhibition spaces and includes 12 artists from Europe and the Americas, curated by Alfons
Hug from Germany. According to Nelson Aguilar, “ the 4 th Mercosul Biennial is privileged to
be able to create a concrete link with the 26th São Paulo Biennial through the presence of its
curator Alfons Hug”. In organising this sector, Hug has made possible the participation of
other countries which are not part of the South American Common Market or Mexico.
Among the works selected – all of which are inspired by the career of the Venezuelan liberator
Simon Bolívar – are video installations by Maurício Dias/Walter Riedweg (Brazil/Switzerland),
Ari Marcopoulos (United States), a sound installation by Tato Taborda (Brazil), sculptures by
the Columbian María Fernanda Cardoso and “Los Carpinteros” (Cuba), photographs by
Martín Chambí (Peru), Frank Thiel, Michael Wesely (Germany) and Luis Molina-Pantin
(Venezuela) and also painting by Arturo Herrera (Venezuela).
The Historical Exhibition “The Archaeology of the High Lands and Low Lands” shows
Pre-Columbian Trans-Andean, Amazonian and Atlantic Coastal artistic production. There are
around 100 works up to 4000 years old including antiquities from Columbia, Bolivia, Peru, and
Brazil. It is curated by the archaeologists Eduardo Neves and Adriana Schmidt Dias.
DNA – The special section “Genetic Archaeology” shows a genetic map of the Biennial
itself, based on the work of the geneticist and lecturer from the Federal University of Minas
Gerais, Dr. Sérgio Danilo Pena, in an installation developed by the engineer Ary Perez. With a
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strong visual design, the work – which resembles a Fallopian tube – will have the ancestry tests
of the artists and cultural workers who make up the Biennial printed on its surface.
“The tests are based on a new method developed by Dr Pena and enable not only the mapping
of human genetics, but the perception of the fantastic genetic variation and confluence from
different origins”, states the general curator.
Alongside the Transnational exhibitions, contemporary work from the six contries that
comprise Mercosul, and Mexico will be shown in National Representations. Each country
will also have an exhibition honouring an important artist: Antonio Berni (Argentina), Pierre
Verger (France, with photos of Bolivians), Roberto Matta (Chile), Lívio Abramo (Paraguay),
María Freire (Uruguay) and Jose Clemente Orozco (Mexico).
In Brazil’s case, there will be two spaces; one devoted to the artist of honour in this year’s Biennial,
Saint Clair Cemin from Rio Grande do Sul who lives in New York; and another exclusively for the
artists in the Brazilian Representation selected by the curator Franklin Espath Pedroso: Lygia Pape,
Ivens Machado, Janaína Tschäpe, José Damasceno, Laura Lima, Laércio Redondo, Lia
Menna Barreto, Rosana Paulino and Solange Pessoa.
Structure – The president of the Mercosul Biennial Foundation, Renato Malcon, has been working
for three years on the exhibition’s structure, acquiring a budget of R$ 8 million, of which R$ 5 million
is coming exclusively from private initiatives and the other R$ 3 million from state agencies. “Thanks
to bold cultural marketing undertaken by the Mercosul Visual Arts Biennial Foundation in the first half
of 2002 it has been possible to professionally acquire the resources for this edition, enabling us to reach
a budget of 8 million almost one month before the event opens. We are very satisfied with this result
which demonstrates that the market recognises the quality of the event and the enormous
corresponding possibilities for investors” , says Malcon, who took over presidency of the Foundation
in 2001.
Reflecting the importance of the exhibition for the countries of the economic bloc, Renato Malcon
attended the 24th Mercosul Presidential summit in June of this year, with President Luis Inácio Lula da
Silva and six South American heads of state (Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia and
Venezuela).
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FACILITIES
LOCATIONS OF EXHIBITIONS
Usina do Gasômetro
Av. Presidente João Goulart, 551, tel.
(051) 3212-5979
Port Quayside
Av. Mauá, 1050, Warehouses A4, A5,
A6 and A7
MARGS
Pça. da Alfândega, s/n, tel. (051) 32272311
Rio Grande do Sul
Memorial
Pça. da Alfândega, s/n, tel. (051) 32247210
Santander Cultural
Rua Sete de Setembro, 1028, tel. (051)
3287-5500
Saint Clair Cemin – Artist of Honour
National Representations from Bolivia and Paraguay.
National Representations from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay,
Brazil and Mexico.
Genetic Archaeolgy Exhibition
Iconic Exhibition from Mexico – José Clemente Orozco
Historical Exhibition “The Archaeology of the High Lands and
Low Lands”
Iconic Exhibition from Paraguay– Lívio Abramo
Iconic Exhibition from Bolivia – Pierre Verger Looks at
Bolivia
Iconic Exhibitions from Argentina, Chile and Uruguay
(Antonio Berni, Roberto Matta and María Freire, respectively)
The Exhibition “The Delirium of Chimborazo” takes place in all the spaces of the 4th Mercosul
Biennial
Opening hours:
Tuesday to Sunday – 09.00 to 21.00
Free admission to all exhibition spaces
Educational Action – booking for guided visits:
Telephone: (51) 3228-0778 - 07.45 to 19.30
Times for booked guided visits, Tuesday to Saturday:
Mornings: 09.00 to 11.40
Afternoons: 13h40 to 17.00
Evenings: 19.30
Email for contact: rp.acaoeducativa@Biennialmercosul.art.br
Official Website: http://www.Biennialmercosul.art.br
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THE 4TH MERCOSUL BIENNIAL
Odes to origins
By Nelson Aguilar
The question of origins continues to burn among the people of Latin America to such an
extent that it has become the mark of the 4th Mercosul Visual Arts Biennial. It does not
matter if the questioner is of African, Amerindian, Asian, or European descent. It converges in
the mythical times of creation, in the material vestiges of the earliest cultures, the molecular
biological scientific calibration caused by the arrival of man on the American continent, the
ease with which contemporary artists investigate beginnings. When the speed with which
information is processed increases vertiginously, it befalls an art exhibition’s curator to research
the primordial and compose a mosaic that looks at archaeology from the point of view of
today.
The decision to organise an exhibition of Andean, Amazonian and Atlantic Coastal
archaeology at the heart of a contemporary art biennial constitutes a first consultation at the
oracle of ages. Modern art, throughout the period of its development, always showed
unexpected leaps towards geography and history.
Impressionism probes Japanese prints; cubism, African art; expressionism, work from Oceania;
post-war art considers Art Brut, plunders the everyday, reveals the extremely close as extremely
distant, occupies landscape as territory and no longer subject matter. The relationships between
objects, the awareness of interval, the way of approaching and distancing things, make the
immaterial tangible.
Promoting archaeology in a contemporary event does not propose a paradox for the sake of
paradox, but questions the linear concept of history and confirms that art takes inspiration
from diverse times and places.
Even in the last decade pre-Columbian art was understood to be only the artistic production of
the altiplano. The archaeologists Eduardo Neves and Adriana Schmidt Dias break with this
hierarchy and examine the continent before the arrival of the white man as an uninterrupted traffic
of exchange in all directions.
One of the great opportunities of the 4th Mercosul Biennial is to set up a concrete link with the 26th
São Paulo Biennial by bringing in its curator, Alfons Hug to organise the Transversal Exhibition,
which aims to include the participation of other countries that are not part of the South American
Common Market or the guest country.
The proposed theme pays respect to a Latin-American narrative, and the poetic reception of the
work of Simon Bolívar. The São Paulo insitution has been in existence for 52 years, and has
organised 25 Biennials, receiving around 70 countries for each edition. This value will be
transferred to its younger relative which intends to call attention not to the international art circuit,
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but to a regional centre that aims to achieve its own autonomy and contribute to the “balance of
the universe” to use the words of the great liberator.
The murmur of Utopia that inflicted America at the start of the 19th century runs through Bolívar’s
oratory work “The Delirium of Chimborazo”, which inspires the transcontinental exhibition.
The exhibition can be exemplified by two of the participants: the Peruvian Martín Chambi and the
German Michael Wesely, masters of light. What can one say about a photographer who has the
agility of Cartier-Bresson and needs only to travel his own world of the Andean Indian, speaking to
his companions in the Quechua language of the defeated? The record of the person under the skin
of his models distinguishes Chambi’s work from that of the visiting Europeans.
Wesely choses the llanos region, of the lower Orinoco basin, where Bolívar received the support of
the mestizo population for his liberation campaign, as landscape. He works with extremely long
exposure times. He defines the constants of the visible. When he documents urban scenes, as
could be seen in the 25th São Paulo Biennial, using Berlin as a construction site, the ghosts of
cranes, of old and new buildings, of the movement of the sun sweep through the image. In dealing
with nature, geological time collaborates to show horizontal layers dominated by the eternal blue of
the river.
With the aim of properly showing the countries of Mercosul and the guest country – this year
Mexico – each has its national representation of contemporary art and also an exhibition
honouring an important artist. This is an initiative that will strengthen the character of the Biennial
as the gateway to the art of Latin America.
José Clemente Orozco has not benefited from the recent reputation of his colleagues David
Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera, not to speak of the interest awakened in the life and work (in
that order) of Frida Kahlo. His work seems to have emerged intact from the obscurity of time, as if
suddenly revealed by successful archaeological excavation. The curator Agustín Arteaga, who is
responsible for organising the show knows well the ebb and flow of Orozco’s reception. If there is
one area where North Americans and Latin Americans come together it is alongside the work of
Jackson Pollock who felt the impact of the murals at Pomona College California, which are ruled
by the figure of Prometheus.
The Mexican Government, through the National Advisory Board for Culture and the Arts, which
has enabled the transporting of masterpieces abroad, raises surprising discoveries to an unimagined
level in authorizing the transport of the Blue Skin panel from the Cabañas Cultural Insitute
collection in Guadaljara The synthetic paint follows the pattern of the decomposition of the
human body through the transgression of not conforming to the rectangular shape of the support.
Trunk and limbs glisten in body painting equal to Aztec ceramics, the head doubly severed
frontally and in profile belongs to a world in which sacrificial cults permeate daily existence.
Argentina appears in the constellation of pioneers with the figure of Antonio Berni. This is not a
matter of putting on a monographic exhibition, however necessary, since Berni more than any
other artist, represents the process of the transculturation of modern art in Latin America.
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Pierre Verger visited Bolivia three times between 1939 and 1946, devoting himself to recording
Andean festivals, one of which was the Oruro carnival, today considered as part of mankind’s
living heritage by UNESCO. At that time Verger’s only occupation was photography, living from
the rights to images placed with agencies or illustrating albums of exotic countries and special
events. According to Alex Barabel, curator of the Pierre Verger Foundation in Salvador, the interwar years marked the height of the visual richness of his work, which lost splendour in the 1950s
to a systematic involvement with ethnography directed towards Atlantic Negroes, and in particular
the subject matter of the slave trade and the cult of Orixás.
Saint Clair Cemin assumes the role of configuring Brazil artistically and works the path between
modern and contemporary art. Material condemned to the past, like bronze, marble, wood
reappear in a surprising way. The tension between fullness and emptiness, the refined awareness of
scale, the spatial unfolding of his works are directed towards public works. The facets of Hipercuia
express the cosmic manner of being a Gaúcho.
Roberto Matta joined the Surrealists when he was young, aware that it would be the most radical
stage of poetic and political knowledge. Experiments linked with the study of the fourth
dimension, topology, to the “discovery of regions of space unexplored in the field of art until
then” (Marcel Duchamp) are parallel to anti-conformism, to challenges to the virtues disseminated
by the establishment, to the demand for a planet without visas. The curator Francisco Brugnoli
asks the artist for his birth certificate and qualifies him among those beyond nationalism, like the
poet Vicente Huidobro.
Lívio Abramo appears as a master of Paraguayan Art. This is confirmed by the respect he is given
by both new and older compatriots. He should be called “Braziguayan”, since he moved to
Asunción in 1962 after a six year courtship. His use of printmaking grows with an awareness of its
generative associations and, like a resolute labourer, carefully protects them. Landscapes that may
be called pre-Paraguayan appear in several of Lívio Abramo’s Brazilian series, with their
continuous development of dominant horizontal and vertical lines echoing the support, enriched
by the diagonal tensions which will culminate in the Rains cycle. The curator Javier Alcalá intends
to suggest that the work of this iconic artist looks at the history of art as a radiating force and not
as an official heritage, passive, anxious for museological consecration.
María Freire guarantees the primacy of Platine concrete art on the South American continent.
Ignoring the ideological quarrels of her Argentinean colleagues, the clarity of drawing in her
paintings and sculptures is the dominant force of her activity. The early arrival of constructivism in
the countries of the South indicates that Brazilian modernism functioned as a impediment to the
entry of a less figurative movement that was more concerned with the formulation of universal
language. The curator Gabriel Peluffo Linari lets us see the intersections and similarities of the
passions of three friends and highly formal practitioners - María Freire, Lívio Abramo and Lygia
Pape -, setting up one of the major colloquia of the 4th Biennial. Another memorable teaching of
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this great Uruguayan artist shows how the kinetic art which interested South Americans in Paris
acquires its own status in Radiantes and Vibrantes.
The National Representations return to artistic practice at the heat of the moment. The
incomparable quality of Mexican pre-Columbian art does not inhibit the questionings of artistarchaeologists assembled by the curator Edgardo Ganado Kim. The group is spread across
different urban landscapes with the aim of unlocking the feelings that emerge and yet are not
noticed by the community.
We have asked the curator Adriana Rosenberg to develop a particular idea within the Latin
American aesthetic field: Buenos Aires, capital of psychoanalysis. Everyone admires the way in
which Freudian doctrine has taken hold, expanded and matured in Argentina. Chemical
compounds present in the Southern soil enable the growth of cattle, the cultivation of wheat and
vineyards and… effective dialogue.
In the mountains Gastón Ugalde produces an artistic project associated with Lygia Pape’s Divisor,
in which the same cloth would cover many heads. The Bolivian artist travelled the country in
search of a textile work woven by each community. The final result creates an immense sail able to
catch the wind and propel the country driven by its sensitivity. It is the result of a conceptual and
collective practice which is affectionately adapted to the country with nothing left over. The
national submission is organised by the curator Cecília Bayá.
In Brazil genetics is associated with developments notable for the genome sequencing of bacteria
causing agricultural pests and through research that seeks to clarify the origin, composition and
migratory movements of the Brazilian and global population. Professor Sérgio Danilo Pena, of the
Federal University of Minas Gerais, analysed the genetic formation of the polpulation based on the
DNA of 200 white Brazilians using variations of the exclusively male Y chromosome, and
mitochondrial DNA indicators of the maternal line as biological markers.
The results showed that 60% of the maternal line is of Amerindian or African descent and 90% of
the paternal line European, mapping the sociability of the tropical Adam and Eve. This year the
scientist requested genetic material from the artists and cultural workers involved in the 4th Biennial
to perform an ancestry test. The engineer Ary Parez has designed the spatial arrangement which
shows the kaleidoscope of sources taking part in this Latin American event.
The curator Franklin Espath Pedroso asked Brazilian artists to base their work on this source.
Lygia Pape has always paid careful attention to origins, whether in the Livro da Criação, or Manto
Tupinambá. Her art always imbues science with a poetic dimension. The assembly of bowls of
coloured liquids has something to do with the visual appearance of genetic sequencing and the
grains of rice and beans spread over the ground reconstruct a part of the Brazilian people that is
stronger than genotypes and phenotypes. Each participant in the National Representation reveals
something of DNA, confirming Georges Braque’s motto: “Science is calming, art is disturbing”.
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The curator Francisco Brugnoli interprets the exhibition theme based on the particular conditions
of the Chilean art scene, where the richness of contemporary artistic production vies with the
absence of a cult of art in the cultural memory of collections and first hand knowledge of
masterpieces. Faced with the victory of reproduction over the individual work, of illustration over
the original, art makes use of the means of mass communication. Pop art is born without tradition.
The curator Javier Rodríguez Alcalá chooses to show artists who work with photographic imagery
and are interested in working with an archaeological interpretation of the present. Several of those
working within this artistic area demonstrate the desire of dismantling the cultural identity imposed
by authoritarian regimes. Criticism penetrates the most poetic subjects like rain. The abundant
rainfall can take on alarming proportions in the centre of South America due to its orographic
situation, its gushing rivers, where the main export is hydroelectric power.
The Uruguayan curator Gabriel Peluffo Linari links contemporary archaeology with the virtual
excavation of memory. The starting point of the idea comes from the lyrical evocation of the
appearance and disappearance of objects, of people eliminated by dictators. In working with soup
cans the artist Ricardo Lanzarini runs up against images canonized by the Gotha of International
Art. He provides simulacra of Andy Warhol with an almost hallucinatory realistic dimension in
referring to his crafted packagings of popular soups. His installation does not cultivate naturalism
as a stylistic exercise, but as an option for survival. Walter Benjamin becomes a strong reference
for the cultural routine of our countries that have to deal with high levels of poverty and the
constant devaluation of experience.
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TRANSVERSAL EXHIBITION – THE DELERIUM OF
CHIMBORAZO
Curator: Alfons Hug
In his famous “Jamaica letter”, the liberator Simón Bolívar – who conquered half the South
American continent – deplores the lack of union among American peoples, but specifically on
the Southern continent. He proposes several stategies which over the decades did not meet
with success. If there exists a strong possibility of union of the continent today, a modern
Jamaica Letter, it is best expressed in cultural events, and above all in art biennials, which carry
a message not only of political union, but of emancipation through aesthetics.
The Mercosul Biennial, one of the most recent, yet not least important, of the 50 that exist
throughout the world is a crucial paragraph in this new letter. If it was initially thought of as a
unifying point for the Southern Cone, it is increasingly called upon to reflect upon the destiny
of the entire continent and its relations with the rest of the world. In this way it frees the
creative energies of America and other continents.
In the Transversal Exhibition we follow the steps of Bolívar, from the surging Orinoco to the
the gigantic shoulders of the Andes, carrying us to the “Delirium of Chimborazo”, Bolívar’s
poem in which he achieves complete transcendence.
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The Transversal Exhibition runs through all the Biennial spaces and brings together a total of
12 artists from the two Americas and Europe. They are: Maurício Dias/Walter Riedweg,
video-installation; (Brazil/Switzerland), Artur Barrio, installation (Brazil); Tato Taborda, sound
installation (Brazil); Martín Chambi, photography (Peru); Maria Fernanda Cardoso, sculpture
(Columbia); Arturo Herrera, painting (Venezuela); Luis Molina Pantin, photography
(Venezuela); Los Carpinteros, sculpture (Cuba); Rachel Berwick, installation (United States);
Ari Marcopoulos, video (United States); Michael Wesely, photography (Germany); Frank Thiel,
photography (Germany).
Alfons Hug
Artists –Transversal Exhibition “The Delirium of Chimborazo”
Ari Marcopoulos - Amsterdam, Netherlands,1957
Main Exhibitions:
2003 The Bowl. Jeffrey Deitch, New York, USA
2002 Overnight to Many Cities .The Photographers’ Gallery, London, England
Strange Glue. Ratio 3, Brooklyn, New York, USA
2002 Pass The Mic 1991-1996. Shibuya Tower, Tokyo, Japan (individual)
Artur Barrio - Porto, Portugal, 1945
Main Exhibitions
2001 Da Adversidade Vivemos. Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France
2000 Versiones del Sur: Cinco Propuestas en Torno a la Arte en América. Museu Nacional Centro de
Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain
2001 A Metáfora dos Fluxos. Paço das Artes, São Paulo; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de
Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro (individual)
Arturo Herrera - Caracas, Venezuela, 1959
Main Exhibitions:
1998 Arturo Herrera and Kara Walker. Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, England.
1996 Arturo Herrera and Carla Preiss. Thread Waxing Space, New York, USA
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1995 Crystal Blue Persuasion. Feature, New York, USA
2000 - Party for Tom. P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, USA
Frank Thiel - Kleinmachnow, Germany, 1966
Main Exhibitions:
2003 Arquivo e Simulação. Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, Portugal
A cidade radiante. 2nd Valencia Biennial, Bancaixa Foundation, Valencia, Spain
La photographie allemande. Galerie Art+Public, Geneva, Switzerland
2002 Iconografias Metropolitanas, Cidades. 25th São Paulo Biennial, Biennial Foundation, São
Paulo
Human Park. An exhibition of global creatures. Queens’s Palace II, Barcelona, Spain
2003 Galeria Helga de Alvear, Madrid, Spain (individual)
Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, Austria (individual)
Los Carpinteros - Marco Antonio Castillo Valdés, Camagüey, Cuba, 1971; Dagoberto
Rodriguez Sanchez, Caibarién, Las Villas, Cuba, 1969; Alexandre Arrechea, Trinidad, Cuba,
1970
Main Exhibitions:
2003
Stretch. The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada
Sentido Comum. Havana Gallery, Havana, Cuba
Dreamspaces – Entre sonhos. Deutsche Bank Lobby Gallery, New York, USA
Rest in Space. Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany
2002
Artists in residence. The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle, England
(individual)
Cidade Transportado. Contemporary Art Museum of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
(individual)
2001
A Plantação de Café, Galeria Camargo Villaça, São Paulo (individual)
Luis Molina-Pantin, Geneva, Switzerland, 1969
Main Exhibitions:
2002 Iconografias Metropolitanas. XXV Biennial de São Paulo, São Paulo
Europa-América. 25th São Paulo Biennial Selection Museu de Arte Contemporânea,
Santiago de Chile.
Rare (Ad) diction. Museum London, London, Ontario, Canada
2001 Buried Mirrors. Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York, USA
2001 New Landscapes. Onefront Gallery, New York, USA (individual)
1999 Apocalyptic Beginning. Canvas Art Foundation, Amsterdam, Netherlands (individual)
María Fernanda Cardoso, Bogotá, Columbia, 1963
Main Exhibitions:
2002
Material World: 25 Years of the Fabric Workshop and Museum. Museum of Contemporary
Art, Sydney, Austrália
2001-2003 Final Do Eclipse (End of the Eclipse). Telefonica Foundation, Madrid, Spain; Mexico
Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City, Mexico
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2000-2002 Ultra Baroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art. Museum of Contemporary Art, San
Diego, USA; The Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada
2002
Sheep. Art Museum of the Americas, Washington D.C., USA (individual)
Butterfly Drawings. Galeria Casas-Riegner, Miami, USA (individual)
Desenhos de Mariposas (Butterfly Drawings). Galeria Diners, Bogotá, Columbia
(individual)
Martín Chambi, Coaza, Peru, 1891 - 1973
Martín Chambi comes from a time when Peru was undergoing great social and economic
transformation. His family were originally from the country but gave up potato and coca
farming to work for a gold mining company. There Chambi first came into contact with
photography, through the company photographer who taught him the rudiments of the
technique. This lucky break led him to leave the region and try his luck in the city of Arequipa
in 1908. Here Chambi worked as an apprentice in a photographer’s studio, where he remained
for nine years. Arequipa saw the emergence of a great photographer and the exhibition of his
first photographs. But his career was given a definitive boost with his move to Cuzco in 1920
where he opened his own studio. From this period come his first Andean landscapes and other
famous photographs, which sold by the thousand and were published as postcards, of which
Chambi was the pioneer in his country. International recognition for his work came at the end
of the 1940s, at the hands of the North American anthropologist and photographer Edward
Ranney, who classified the 14 thousand glass plates in the artist’s archive. This investigation
resulted in a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and others in several
world capitals such as London, Paris and Zurich.
Maurício Dias / Walter Riedweg, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 1964 / Lucerne, Switzerland, 1955
Main Exhibitions:
1999 48th Venice Biennial, Italy
1998 24th São Paulo International Biennial, São Paulo,
1996 Conversations at the Castle. The Arts Festival of Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Michael Wesely, Munich, Germany, 1963
Main Exhibitions:
2003 New York Verticals. Galerie Fahnemann, Berlin, Germany
Interrogare il luogo. Studio La Cittá, Verona
2002 Walter Storms Galerie, Munich, Germany
2001 American Landscape. Galerie Fahnemann, Berlin, Germany
2000 Walter Storms Galerie, Munich, Germany
Rachel Berwick, Somers Point, New Jersey, USA, 1962
Main Exhibitions:
2002 Keep in Touch. Brent Sikkema, New York, USA
2001 7th Istanbul International Biennial. Istanbul, Turkey
2000 The Greenhouse Effect. Serpentine Gallery, London, England
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2000 Brent Sikkema, New York, USA
Tato Taborda, Curitiba, Paraná, 1960
Composer, pianist and teacher, Taborda has taken part as a student and teacher in nine editions of
the Latin American Courses in Contemporary Music, which toured to several Latin American
countries. Between 1980 and 1986 he organised and directed the Juntos-Música Nova group which
was dedicated to contemporary repertoire, and particularly to the new generation. As a composer
he has taken part in the programmes of festivals and groups such as the Contemporary Brazilian
Music Biennials, Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, Donaueschinger Musiktage (Germany), Ensemble für
Neue Musik Zürich (Switzerland), The Festival of Perth (Austrália) and Ressonance Contemporaine
(France), and others. Tato Taborda currently works as a lecturer on university courses, and also for
events such as music workshops and festivals.
HISTORICAL EXHIBITION “The Archaeology of the High Lands and Low
Lands”
Curators: Eduardo Neves and Adriana Schmidt Dias
Knowledge about the different societies that flourished in pre-Columbian America is based on
the vestiges of the materials they produced, consumed and discarded, with an emphasis on
ceramics. Work with clay is free from the formal restrictions imposed by other materials such
as stone. Therefore its formal and decorative possibilities are practically infinite. However,
observing of the objects chosen for the exhibition reveals an interesting phenomenon: upon
the great formal and decorative diversity of ceramics produced in pre-Columbian South
America there is a series of underlying common references that appear in different forms
depending on the historical context in which the objects were produced.
Such references are based on two recurrent principles in the pre-Columbian art of the
continent: objects with iconography of transformation and objects with iconography of reproduction.
Iconographies of transformation are characterised by figures with various combinations of
human and animal features. Typically, such objects are composed of figures with a human
body and an animal head. In some cases, the representation can be metonymic: animal features
suggested only by pointed feline fangs modelled or painted onto human faces. In other cases,
such as Tapajonian ceramics the transformations take place through so called “dual figures”,
15
which occur in the making of artefacts in which human figures assume bird forms, and viceversa.
As well as in ceramics, these iconographies are found in groups of wooden, metal and textile
artefacts from both the High Lands and the Low Lands. These representations first become
visible in the Peruvian Andes in the first millennium B.C. in the Chavin culture, appearing later
in different contexts and even in cases of Tapajonian ceramics dating from the period of the
arrival of Europeans in Amazonia in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Objects with the iconography of reproduction are those representing individuals, gestures,
organs or artefacts linked to pregnancy, the sexual act, or genitalia. Like the iconography of
transformation, objects with the iconography of reproduction are widely distributed
throughout pre-Columbian South America. Some of the most typical examples are the painted
funerary urns of the Marajoara style, representing pregnant women, or those known as stirrup
jars in the Moche culture, with naturalistic representations of different coital scenes. In
Marajoara ceramics many funerary urns are decorated with anthropomorphic feminine motifs
with iconography that refers directly to pregnancy (in this sense, the most suitable term would
be gynecomorphism). Such a narrative indicates a cyclical concept of existence, in which birth and
death are combined in the same category of objects by means of their contents and decoration.
Eduardo Neves and Adriana Schmidt Dias
SPECIAL EXHIBITION – GENETIC ARCHAEOLOGY
Installation: Ary Perez
Scientific Supervision: Sergio Danilo Pena
We are talking about genetic-art or another expression that indicates the fusion of genetic sciences
with the making of art. Science has to be proved, art not. The biotechnological revolution
currently in process has already been established as a new code that is no longer a sequence of
ones and zeros but of cytosines, adenines, thymines, and guanines (C, A, T and G), forming a
new powerful basis of communication. This revolution is creating a new hierarchy among the
nations and regions of the planet, “those who are bio-literate and those who are bio-illiterate”
(Rodrigo Martinez, Harvard Business School, 2003).
The genetic photograph of each of the artists and other cultural workers taking part in the 4 th
Mercosul Biennial is displayed in a group of all the results, thus forming a map of the ancestry
of South American artists. It enables the telling of a little of their history and that of Latin
American art from the genetic point of view.
The installation unfolds into three main physical parts: the suspension bridge, the membrane
and the structure of reaction. The suspension bridge allows people to float over the codes,
enabling passage, the transformation of perception, like the monument of creation inside the
fallopian tube, a great tensioned membrane, printed with the genetic codes of each participant.
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Ary Perez
The current population of the countries of Latin America was created by a complex process of
miscegenation between Amerindians, Africans and Europeans. The relative percentages of
these theree ancestries vary from country to country. For example, our genetic studies of the
DNA of white Brazilians reveal that the overwhelming majority of paternal lineage of the white
population of the country comes from Europe, but that 60% of maternal lineage is from
Amerindians or Africans. Thus the maternal lineage is more heterogenous and informative with
regards to our historical past. And was chosen to characterize the genetic diversity of the LatinAmerican artists of the 4th Mercosul Biennial.
Prof. Dr. Sergio Danilo Pena
BRAZIL
Artist of Honour: Saint Clair Cemin
Curator: Nelson Aguilar
Saint Clair Cemin’s works demonstrate a freedom unequalled in the history of sculpture. They
break from the genetic chains of modernism which require an economic, abstracted stance from
each of its descendants. The titles also escape from the austere diet of the pioneers, causing rich
associations that open new perspectives towards the objects, populating their content with stories.
The dilemma between figuration and abstraction looses its sense here, since Saint Clair works in a
field in which the object is neither an autarchy or an end in itself, but is reduced to a fragment in a
vast network of imagery. The environment is as sensitive as the cultural world. Maybe this is why
anthropologists and writers peer over.
Material condemned to the past, like bronze, marble, wood reappear in a surprising way. Some
pieces are glow polychromatically, others are animated by contrasting colours. In Esfera, 2002, the
pale colour of the stone, the internal undulating vectors, the concise expressive syntax are closer to
baroque sensibility than to neoclassicism. The tension between fullness and emptiness, the refined
awareness of scale, the spatial unfolding of his works are directed towards public works.
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Saint Clair Cemin is taking part in the 4th Mercosul Biennial, as much as an invited artist as to
clarify the conceptual idea of contemporary archaeology. He will be the bridge that unites Orozco,
Matta, Freire, Abramo and Berni with contemporary artists.
Nelson Aguilar
Saint Clair Cemin – has lived in New York for 25 years. He comes from Cruz Alta, RS and
will be the first living fine artist of honour in the Biennial. He studied in Paris and the United
States, gaining international recognition for the sculptures he has been producing since 1983
with materials ranging from iron to porcelain, and including marble, copper and synthetic
resins. He took part in the Kassel Documenta in Germany (1992) and two years later in the
22nd São Paulo International Biennial. His work is in collections such as the Chase Manhattan
Bank and the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York; the Contemporary Art
Foundation, Paris; and the Hakone Open-Air Museum, Japan, and also Mexican, Swedish and
Spanish institutions.
In the Mercosul Biennial Cemin is showing small works from the start of his career, mediumsized works produced more recently, and also works on paper. This somewhat retrospective
exhibition by Cemin will also have as a highlight one large work which will be the first
sculpture by the artist in a public space in Brazil.
BRAZIL
National Representation
Curator: Franklin Espath Pedroso
The theme of the 4th Mercosul Biennial, contemporary archaeology, leads us to ask a little more
about the significance of archaeology for modern man, confronted by great transformations in
every area of his existence. So we can conclude that today man seems more inclined to seek
answers to his concerns about the future than about the comforting certainties of earlier times.
Facing this fact we have chosen works that reflect upon the idea of transformation and set up
a form of prospecting with regard to the future of man, through means of transformations,
displacements or suppositions. It is not new for artists to use scientific concepts to explain or
produce their works, and such a tendency only grows to the extent that work of scientific
vulgarisation and metaphysical or religious concepts have been reinterpreted under the prism
of quantum physics.
In the pieces chosen for the Brazilian representation at the 4th Mercosul Biennial, we are
showing works that deal with this question of human life. We can check many of these
relationships with the genome; with DNA; with molecules and with as many modifications
possible, imaginable, or rather, unimaginable.
Franklin Espath Pedroso
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Artists –Brazilian Representation
Ivens Machado – Florianópolis (SC), 1942
Main Exhibitions:
2002 Cidadeprojeto / cidadeexperiência. MAM/Villa-Lobos, São Paulo (SP)
2002 O Engenheiro de Fábulas. Museu Vale do Rio Doce, Vila Velha (ES)
1991 Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo (SP); (individual)
Janaína Tschäpe
Main Exhibitions:
2003 Unesco Salutes Women in Art. Unesco HQ, Paris, France
2002 Stories. Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany
2001 Panorama da Arte Brasileira. Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo.
José Damasceno - Rio de Janeiro (RJ), 1968
Main Exhibitions:
2003 Living inside the grid. - New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, USA; (group show)
2002 25th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo (SP), Brazil; (group show)
2002 The Project. New York, USA; (individual)
Laércio Redondo – Paranavaí (PR), 1967
Main Exhibitions:
2003 Arghh. Edsvik Konst & Kultur, Stockholm, Sweden; (group show)
2002 Matéria-Prima da Arte Brasileira. Novo Museu, Curitiba (PR); (group show)
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Artgenda. Hamburgo, Germany; (group show)
2000 Greek Institute, Stockholm, Sweden; (individual)
Laura Lima - Governador Valadares (MG), 1971
Main Exhibitions:
2002 Ciclo de Performances. MAM do Rio de Janeiro (RJ); (group show)
2001 Virgin Territory. National Museum of Women in Arts, Washington, USA (group show)
2002 Homem=carne/Mulher=carne. Moderna Galerija, Ljubliana, Slovenia; (individual)
Project Rooms. Feria ARCO, Madrid, Spain; (individual)
Lia Menna Barreto - Rio de Janeiro (RJ), 1959
Main Exhibitions:
2000 Ultra Baroque. Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, USA; (group show)
1998 Exercícios Afetivos. Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul (RS); (group show)
2000 Galeria Camargo Villaça, São Paulo (SP); (individual)
Diário de uma boneca, Obra Aberta. Galeria Pedro Cera, Lisboa, Portugal; (individual)
Lygia Pape - Nova Friburgo (RJ), 1929
Main Exhibitions:
2000 Mostra do Redescobrimento. Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo (SP); (group show)
Século 20: Arte do Brasil. Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa, Portugal; (group show)
2001 Centro de Artes Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro (RJ); (individual)
1999 Sedução II - Vai/Vem. Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro (RJ); (individual)
Rosana Paulino - São Paulo (SP), 1967
Main Exhibitions
2000 Photography not Photography. Museo de las Artes de la Universidad de Guadalajara,
Mexico; (group show)
1999 1st Mexico International Photography Biennial. Centro de la Imagen, Cidade do
Mexico, Mexico (group show)
2000 Desenhos. Centro Cultural São Paulo (SP); individual
Solange Pessoa – Ferros (MG),1961
Main Exhibitions:
2003 Pele, Alma. Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo (SP); (group show)
2001 Mostra do Descobrimento. Capc Museé d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France; (group
show)
1995 Grande Galeria do Palácio das Artes, Belo Horizonte (MG); (individual)
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ARGENTINA
Iconic Exhibition: Antonio Berni
Curator: Nelson Aguilar
In the field of the phenomenology of art Berni’s discourse is extremely clear (not forgetting that
Berni was a lecturer in the national School of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires from 1936 to 1946 and was
very well known for his fine teaching). In this context, in 1960 he created the figure of Juanito
Laguna, a global archetype of mysery typical of industrial society . He is the modern industrial
version of Victor Hugo’s Gavroche. And like Hugo’s Gavroche, Berni’s Juanito does not beg alms. He
demands justice. Cretins will give him alms, honest men will do him justice.
The second figure of Berni created was Ramona Montiel, who also conforms to a global archetype: the
female product of consumer society. She is the heir to Zola’s Nana and cousin to Saint-Phalle’s
Nana Niki, who is her contemporary. With one difference: Niki’s Nana rebels against consumerism,
Ramona submits to it. She lives her role as woman-object, according to the view of her clients at the
beginning of the 1960s.
Nana and Ramona share the same exuberant and abundant sexuality. To escape the material misery
that attacks Juanito Laguna, Ramona will resort to all levels of prostitution, like an initiation rite, but
with an existential end different from Juanito, as there is a social role to fulfil in our society mediated
by global communication. Ramona displays and sells her flesh by the kilo, satisfying sex-shop, and
porn magazine voyeurs, who have now immigrated to the Internet and follow the anti-privacy of
television in programmes like Big Brother
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Pierre Restany (France), crítico de arte
Antonio Berni – Born in 1905, in Rosário. He studied drawing, and at the age of 20 won a travel
bursary to Europe. He visited Madrid and started to live in Paris. He became interested in
socialist ideas, associated with the surrealists and started painting in that style. He returned to
Argentina in 1932, exhibiting surrealistic works in Buenos Aires. The following year, he assisted
the Mexican muralist David Siqueiros with his only mural in Argentina. He founded the social
realist group which used strong angles and close-ups, and austere characters similar to those of
the Italian Renaissance.
Berni’s interest in proletarian and peasant poverty continues even when he abandons the realist
style in the 1950s. During the 1960s he created a famous series of collages and assemblages
based on two invented characters: the street child Juanito and his girlfriend, the prostitute
Ramona Montiel. These works using rubbish and combining surrealist techniques of collage with
the concerns of the realist period will be shown at the 4 th Mercosul Biennial. In 1962 he won
the major award for printmaking at the Venice Biennial. Museums throughout the world collect
his works. He died in Buenos Aires in 1981.
ARGENTINA
National Representation
Curator: Adriana Rosenberg
Gyula Kosice – Ciudad Hidroespacial is a group of maquettes, entitled Places. They propose
spaces where the artist defines new human behaviour and questions the function of art.
Sergio Avello – The artist invites us to contemplate a flag that can electronically produce
multiple movements of light. Each narrates its idea of nation, its idea of identity, the present in
the constructive line of its country’s history. In front of a large rectangular set of lights the
spectator contemplates the poetry of movement, and the narrative of history and the present.
Res – The NECAH project, developed by the photographer between 1996 and 2000 reflects
on the possibilities of readings of the past based on the present and a visual possibility for the
work is chosen. It produces a comparative reading since on one side are shown original
photographs from 1880 taken by Antonio Pozzo, and on the other the photographer’s current
photographs produced in the same place.
Jorge Macchi – Uses cut-outs (business cards offering services with their telephone number,
many fixed to trees or forgotten walls) as raw material, but with a change of scale, for an
installation. He proposes that this small caption should abandon its natural place and be
displayed on large billboards throughout the city.
León Ferrari/Augusto Ferrari – Their heliographs are a group of panoramic visions of the
city. Each one suggests a labyrinth, a new reading, the view of a bird contemplating this
conglomeration of people and objects crossing streets, wide avenues and large spaces.
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Selected Argentineans – The project, organised by a group of multidisciplinary artists, arose
as a response to the desire of Argentineans to emigrate following the economic and social
crisis. They show all the visual components of the project, cards, brochures, capsules offering
travel, clothing and objects. Apart from the implied irony, one can reflect on human behaviour
in face of the crisis, the desire to abandon one’s culture.
Adriana Rosenberg
Artists - Argentinean Representation
Diego Levy - Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1973
Main Exhibitions:
2003 - Sangue, One person show at WEB – www.zonazero.com , Mexico
2000 to 1995 – Annual Graphic Reporters Exhibition –ARGRA, Buenos Aires
1996 –Group show El Clarín newspaper, Foto galeria San Martín, Buenos Aires,
Fabian Trigo - Argentina, 1964
Main Exhibitions:
2003 – As. Selected Argentineans, PROA Foundation, Buenos Aires
2002 – As. Selected Argentineans, Art Space, Buenos Aires
Gyula Kosice - 1972
Jorge Macchi - Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1963
Main Exhibitions:
2003 – Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil (individual)
2002 – Fogos de Artifício, Galeria Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires.
2001 - Le 10Neuf, Montbélard Regional Centre for Contemporary Art, France.
León Ferrari/Augusto Ferrari - Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1920
2002 – León Ferrari: The Architeture of Madness, Essex University Gallery, England
1997 – 1st Mercosul Visual Arts Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil
1989 – Retrospecto, Museu Sivori, Buenos Aires.
RES – Córdoba, Argentina, 1957
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Main Exhibitions:
2002 Intervalos Intermitentes, Galería Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires.
1998 Yo Cacto. Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas, Buenos Aires.
1997 NECAH Galeria Del Teatro San Martin, Buenos Aires.
Sergio Avello - Mar Del Plata, Argentina, 1964
Main Exhibitions:
2002 Semana Gal Dabbah, Torrejon Arte Contemporaneo, Buenos Aires.
Contemporanea Art. Miami, United States;
1999 Transliminares. Fondo Nacional de las Artes, Buenos Aires.
BOLIVIA
Iconic Exhibition: Pierre Verger looks at Bolivia
Curator: Alex Baradel
Pierre Verger photographed a series of images of the Oruro Carnival in Bolivia, of which some
will be shown in the 4th Mercosul Biennial. The photographs are exceptional and prove
Verger’s ability to rely on the photo-documentary impulse to capture, the feeling of the “Oruro
Diablada” in an original manner.
It is not always easy to be precise about the dates of photographs taken by a travelling reporter
like Verger. In his photographic archive he was mainly concerned with noting where he
photographed. In the case of the Oruro Carnival photographs from Bolivia, we can follow two
routes. According to Verger’s own words he visited the country on three separate occasions:
1939, 1942, and 1946. An indication that the Oruro photographs were not taken before 1946
can be found in the fact that the book Fiestas y dansas en el Cuzco y en los Andes, published in
1945, shows no photographs of the Oruro Carnival despite including records of numerous
festivals in the Andean region, mainly in Peru, but also in Ecuador and Bolivia.
Checking Verger’s notebooks/diaries in the Pierre Verger Foundation archives in Salvador, it
can be seen that the times when Verger travelled through Bolivia in 1939 and 1942 do not
coincide with the period of the Carnival. While the date of arrival in Oruro, on March 2, can be
found in the 1946 notebook. On March 3, a Sunday, the note “diablada” can be seen and on
the 4th, the record of his departure. It seems therefore, that the photographs being shown in
the Biennial date from a short period of time at the beginning of March 1946.
Some reflections may help to discover the meaning of the Oruro Carnival documentary
photographs, and the significance of the series in the history of photography. Verger’s work is
a rich mixture of photographic reportage, ethnography, and aesthetic experimentation. Verger’s
photographic idea consisted of making records of current cultural life without the
photographer interfering in any way with the scenes being observed. Verger sought a
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depersonalisation of authorship in the images. Objective material was, for Verger sufficiently
coherent to justify itself without requiring an alien aestheticizing of the event.
Verger’s photos transport us to Oruro. The devils with long pointed horns recall the masks of
pre-Columbian gods. The mask is one of the signs through which the persistence of ancient
traditions can be seen, which reveals the participation of the sacred in primitive rites. The
essence of culture is preserved in rites and religious festivals. The mask enables the
transformation of the everyday, shows a hidden and resistant side of humble people. Verger
captures a world.
Cláudia Pôssa, Lecturer at the Federal University of Bahia.
Pierre Verger (Paris, France,1902 – Salvador, Bahia, 1996)
In 1932 the photographer and ethnographer left to travel around the world for 15 years
collecting precious documentation about remote or disappearing civilisations and about the
profound transformations occurring to the cultural traditions of various human groups. He
visited Tahiti, Japan, China, several African countries, the Antilles, the Phillipines, and
Indochina (at that time comprising Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam). In South America
he visited Ecuador, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia and Brazil; and in Central America, Guatemala.
His work was detailed, sensitive and consistent as a photo-reporter and researcher, and brought
him advancement in several areas. Although he did not complete his higher education, he was
awarded the title of Doctor from the Sorbonne (France) in 1968. He was a researcher at the
Musée d´Ethnographie du Trocadéro (today the Musée de l’Homme), research director at the
Centre National de La Recherche Scientifique (Paris), correspondent member of the Musée
National d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris and a correspondent for the Alliance Photo Agency.
In 1946, Verger moved to Salvador (BA) and became deeply involved in studies about the
population of African origins. The Pierre Verger Foundation, established in 1989 in Salvador
houses a rich library, the personal archive and more than 60 thousand negatives produced by
the artist. There are also several books published by the photographer which have become a
reference for the study of the slave trade in Brazil and the African religions and culture that
have taken root here.
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BOLIVIA
National Representation
Curator: Cecília Bayá
Joaquín Sánchez – His work is a metaphor that speaks of the construction of the human
being from the moment he appears in his mother’s belly, passing through the cultural story of
the places that we are invited to inhabit in returning to origins. There are five minutes of
Performance – Installation – Body Art. Time and space are inverted, and a journey through
time takes place. Naked, completely shaved, the body of the artist assumes a foetal position in a
circular capsule with water. Sound plays an important role with images of indigenous textiles of
signs and symbols, with images of lungs breathing and the heart beating. It is projected in
perfect harmony on the liquid surface and the skin. The body speaks incorruptibly, without
prejudice, “ like an entity inseparable from the soul” as the writer Maria Soled Quiroga would
say.
Cecilia Lampo – In an installation the Bolivian artist places us in a situation of introspection.
Entering a Cretan labyrinth whose walls are painted using Urucum seeds, one enters a route
that enables one to be abstracted from the surroundings. A state of anxiety is created, since the
spectator concentrates on what will be found at the end of the path: a mountain of urucum in
which semi-buried phrases and words are buried, half hidden, which construct ancient and
current concepts and provoke reflection about how we are linked to the past or if we can
distance ourselves from history, being capable of “overcoming it” These shiny brass letters
speak of hope, of death and emphasize the philosopher Wittgenstein’s phrase “whereof one
cannot speak thereof one must be silent”.
Gastón Ugalde – The construction of the work Marcha por la vida took almost two decades and
is related to the life of Andean man and the social problems of Bolivia. The work has taken
different forms in previous exhibitions
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In this case, Ugalde shows a large piece of fabric (6 x 20 m), a mounted work whose
components are coloured fabrics made by indigenous peoples and which were collected from
different ethnic groups inhabiting different regions of the Bolivian Andes. It could be
considered as a way of retrieving some of the values that have been covered by time.
Cecilia Bayá
Artists - Bolivian Representation
Cecilia Lampo Murillo - 1952
Main Exhibitions:
2002 Feria del Libro. La Paz, Bolivia
Galeria de Arte Nota, La Paz, Bolivia
2001 Espaço Patiño, Cochabamba, Bolivia
7th Cuenca International Painting Biennial, Ecuador
2000 Galeria Nota, La Paz, Bolivia (individual)
1998 Galeria Emusa, La Paz, Bolivia (individual)
Gastón Ugalde - La Paz, Bolivia, 1946
Main Exhibitions:
2003 Art New York. Javits Gallery, New York, United States
2002 Gallery Evan, New York, United States
2001 49th Venice Biennial, Italy
1999 7th Havana Biennial, Cuba
6th Cuenca International Painting Biennial, Ecuador
Joaquín Sanchez - 1973
Main Exhibitions
2003 “Santa Chola” Zona en Movimiento. Galeria Nota, La Paz, Bolivia
2002 Peti Tendare Arapype. Casanova Santibáñez, Cochabamba, Bolivia
Che Rupa. Manzana de la Rivera, Asunción, Paraguay
Batallon 60. Plaza de los Heroes, La Paz, Bolivia
Eleven Matriki. Aliançe Francaise, La Paz, Bolivia
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CHILE
Iconic exhibition: Roberto Matta
Curator: Francisco Brugnoli
It is a well known fact: the training of Roberto Matta (1911-2002) stook place in a world
greater than his contemporary context in Chile, transcending territoriality. In our particular
case, however, we face a paradox. With his ever mythical nature, the number of works
exhibited in the country since his death has created an unimagined and seemingly inexhaustible
degree of collecting. Matta left Chile in 1933 after studying decoration and architecture. Taken
in by relatives in Madrid he met important names linked to art and literature, like García Lorca,
Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and Onslow-Ford. These contacts released his creative process which
was immediately recognised.
Reprocessing the search for the vanguard and determining a new stimulus for Surrealism,
Matta occupied an “epic”, pivotal position. This is demonstrated in the development of his
career in the United States, when he showed his knowledge and practice of processes related to
automatism to young artists in an initiative which was the origin of the “School of New York”.
He created large canvases that fully identified the gesture of painting with physical effort. For
Duchamp, “ the main contribution of Matta to surrealist painting was the discovery of regions
of space previously unexplored in the realm of art”.
Francisco Brugnoli
Roberto Matta (Santiago, Chile, 1911 – Civitavecchia, Italy, 2002)
Born into a Basque family, Roberto Matta graduated in Architecture from the Catholic
University of Santiago. He soon moved to Paris, France where he worked in Le Corbusier’s
studio. On a journey to Italy, Russia and Spain he met the poet Federico García Lorca, who
gave him a letter of introduction to Salvador Dalí. At the end of the 1930s Matta showed his
first drawings and joined the Surrealists led by André Breton. The artist was always attracted by
the internal and the unconscious. His paintings developed with the Surrealist movement and
represented the imagery of the unconscious. Figurative drawings evolved through time into
abstraction with references to the artists of the period like Dalí and Picasso, and the influence
28
of El Greco. His work changed direction when he met Marcel Duchamp, and at the same time
Matta became fascinated by the relations between modern man and the technological world. In
1960 he became a French citizen. Considered one of the most important artists of the
Surrealist movement, Matta worked until the end of the 1990s, which covers a period of more
than 50 years of artistic activity.
CHILE
National Representation
Curation: Francisco Brugnoli
“La Outra Vuelta de la Copia” –José Bianco’s translation of the title of the work by Henry
James, The Turn of the Screw – and the famous essay by Walter Benjamin concerning the
technical reproducibility of art enables us to identify the symptoms of the current Chilean
situation: a new generation that is reaching unimagined levels of productivity.
40 years ago a new reality began to be created through communication media and the arrival of
industries in Chile. Since then we have been in an landscape that spotlights the neo-liberalism
of exports, and obscures the ruins of successive previous projects of modernization.
“View of Santiago from Peñalolén”, a painting by the Neopolitan artist Alessandro Cicarelli –
who arrived in Chile in the middle of the 19th century to take over the Academia de Bellas
Artes – is a kind of point zero. The painting would prevail over whatever condition of the
landscape itself, and the lack of a local art history- due to the absence of museums of original
works in the country – permitting an opening for some very significant activities.
This context restricted the training of artists to knowledge of reproductions and to a discourse
with those reproduced on a large scale. However, modernity left a heritage of valuing the
process of a work’s production, a growth in the number of galleries and schools of art, and the
social pages of magazines devoted to exhibition openings.
All the artists selected for the show emerged after 1995, with the exception of Virginia
Errázuriz and Pablo Langlois. This pair occupy positions as teachers in relation to the other
participants, and demonstrate the necessity of considering the predecessors of this emerging
generation.
The other works can be placed into broad groups which do not distort their particularities. The
contrast between the absence of previous imagery and consumption, visual sensations
29
stimulated by urban elements and the dissolution of the subject by the appropriation of other
identities are some of the themes approached.
It is a world of accelerated consumption which would function as a compensation for a world
filled with signs of loss.
Francisco Brugnoli
Artists – Chilean Representation
Andrés Durán - Santiago, Chile, 1974
Main Exhibitions:
2003 El Lugar del Crimen. Intervenciones Urbanas, Santiago, Chile
Proyecto Bohemia. Galeria A nimal, Santiago, Chile
Más allá del bien y del mal. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de
2002 Pizarra Mágica. Galeria Metropolitana, Santiago, Chile
Carolina Ruff - Santiago, Chile, 1973
Main Exhibitions:
2002 Paisaje Acondicionado. Galeria Balmaceda 1215, Santiago, Chile
Cartografías del Deseo. Centro Cultural Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile
2001 Laboratorio 5. Galeria Balmaceda, Santiago, Chile
2000 Delicatessen. Centro de Extensão da Universidad Católica de Chile,
Santiago, Chile
Claudia del Fierro - 1974
Main Exhibitions:
2002 Arte y Catástrofe. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Valdivia, Chile
Frutos del País. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile
Alter. Centro Cultural de España, Santiago, Chile
2001 V Bienal de Video y Nuevos Medios. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile
Juan Céspedes - Arica, Chile, 1972
Main Exhibitions:
2003 All about George/ Todo sobre George. Espacio La Rebeca, Bogotá,
Columbia
2002 State of the Gallery. Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, United States
2001 Visible Aspects. Apex Gallery, New York, United States
I Quadriennale Casino 2001. Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst,
Ghent, Belgium
Livia Marin - 1973
30
Main Exhibitions:
2002 Frutos del País. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile
2002 Arte/Naturaleza. Keby Quarn Art Space, Uppsala, Sweden
2001 Yobjetoy. Galera Carmen Codoceo, La Serena, Chile
Marcela Moraga (MMM) - Santiago, Chile, 1975
Main Exhibitions:
2003 Arte y Catástrofe. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Valdivia, Chile
2002 Frutos del País. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile
2002 Frutos del País. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile (individual)
Jam, Galería Animal, Santiago, Chile (individual)
1999 Arte y Catástrofe. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Valdivia, Chile (individual)
Mario Z - Santiago, Chile, 1970
Main Exhibitions:
2003 Cambio de Aceite. Contemporary Chilean Painting, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo,
Santiago, Chile
2002 Speak System. Centro Cultural Borges, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Proyecto Bohemia. Galeria Animal, Santiago, Chile
Pablo Langlois - Santiago, Chile, 1964
Main Exhibitions:
2003 Cambio de Aceite: Revisión Crítica de 20 Años de Pintura en Chile.
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile
2002 Ruinas, Extremo Centro: Espacios de Arte Contemporáneo.
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile
Victor Hugo Bravo - Santiago, Chile, 1966
Main Exhibitions:
2003 Cambio de Aceite. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile
Dos Puntas.Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Bellas Artes, Madrid,
Spain
2002 Operacion Caballo de Troya. Kunsthaus Tacheles, Berlin, Germany
Virginia Errázuriz - 1941
Main Exhibitions:
2001 Calle y Acontecimiento. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile
2000 Línea de Borde /Colectivo de Mujeres desde Chile. Museo de Arte
Contemporáneo, Centro Pedagógico y Cultural Simón I. Patiño,
Cochabamba, Bolivia
Yennyferth Becerra - 1973
Main Exhibitions:
2003 P/A, Proyecto Intercambio Cultural Chile-Suecia-Alemania. Galeria Keby
Quarn Art Space, Uppsala, Sweden
31
2002 BECERRA+GELCIC+HERNÁNDEZ, proyecto “Extremo Centro”. Centro
Cultural Balmaceda 1215, Santiago, Chile
Piel Artificial. Centro Cultural Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile
PARAGUAY
Iconic exhibition: Livio Abramo
Curator: Javier Alcalá
Lívio Abramo (1903-1993) is a figure of reference on the art scene in Brazil – the country of
his birth – and Paraguay where he develop a fertile role “starting from” and “for” the cultural
process of the country from 1956. We emphasize these two prepositions because they explain
the two aspects of his relationship with Paraguay: his importance for local art and,
symmetrically – the influences of it on his own work.
Lívio exhibited for the first time in Asunción in 1956, two years after the Semana Del Arte
Moderno – considered as the start of modern art in the country. With this significant delay in
relation to its neighbours, Paraguayan modernism was marked by ruptures, continuities and
dualities of formal and conceptual references (post-impressionists, avant-gardists, etc…).
The arrival of Abramo became relevant due to his capacity for understanding and placing
himself within these heterogenous circumstances. He contributed productively not only in the
practice of teaching – which can be seen in the increase in the percentage of people attending
his courses – but also promoting cultural exchange with Brazil in the organisation of
exhibitions linked to Modernism and artists who were at that time considered “emergent”.
On his first visit he gave practical and theoretical class in woodcut printmaking to a group of
local artists. His definitive return in 1962 –as co-ordinator of the Brazilian Cultural Mission in
Asunción – was decisive in causing the graphic image to feature in the Paraguayan art scene
until the 1970s.
Abramo worked with woodcuts during this period producing work that showed continuity
with his output in Brazil: an expressive use of changes of scale, and fidelity to landscape. On
the other hand, the local influence on his work was significant: less open forms, slower
rhythms, and the human figure restricted to portraits.
A researcher into the sacred imagery of Paraguay and missionary peoples, Abramo travelled
throughout the country several times and reinterpreted local elements of architecture and
nature in his prints. This tendency can also be seen in the drawings he produced between 1964
and 1991, which have various subjects, but with references to urban landscapes.
32
Livio Abramo’s expressive and constructively rigourous work celebrates the link between
routine appearances and the amazement of revealing the hidden.
Javier Alcalá
Lívio Abramo (Araraquara, Brazil, 1903 – Asunción, Paraguay, 1992)
Born of Italian immigrants, Abramo grew up in a liberal and educated environment. His
maternal grandfather believed in anarchism and helped to give him political-humanistic ideas
which characterise his art work and his trade union militancy. He started drawing while he was
still adolescent in 1917 and studied with Enrique Vio. He abandoned his studies in 1921.
Five years later he was married and had three children. In the same period he made contact
with the work of the European artistic and architectural avant-garde, and the Brazilian
modernist avant-garde. His first woodcuts date from 1926. In parallel he developed an intense
political–social and journalistic activity. He was a member of the Brazilian Communist Party,
the Socialist Party, and founder of the São Paulo Union of Journalists. He worked as an
illustrator and writer for the Diário da Noite, from 1931 to 1962.
From 1940, when he met Adophe Kohler, his print works show significant formal and
technical clarity. A year later he held his first one-person show in the Galeria Clovis Graciano.
In the same decade he made architectural drawings, panels and mosaics. In 1948 he met Dora
Guimarães, his partner until the end of his life. In 1950 he was awarded a study bursary to
Europe, where he lived from 1951 to 1953.
He visited museums and Stanley Hayter’s Studio 17, where he made intaglio prints. In 1953 he
won the best printmaker prize at the 2nd São Paulo Biennial, and started lecturing in the São
Paulo Museum of Modern Art School of Crafts. In 1956 he founded the Taller de Grabado
Julián de la Herrería with Paraguayan artists. In 1961 he organized an exhibition of missionary
sculpture which was shown in the 6th São Paulo Biennial. The following year he moved to
Paraguay, and until shortly before his death did exceptional work as a lecturer and cultural
promoter. He exhibited in several countries in South America and Europe, the United States
and Japan. His work is held in museums such as the Louvre, Bibliothéque National de Paris
and the British Museum Library, and in many private collections.
Javier Alcalá
33
PARAGUAY
National Representation
Curation: Javier Alcalá
We have selected photography for the 4th Mercosul Biennial because we consider that that this
covers the requirement of showing current work and at the same time allows us to approach
local work based on the circumstances linked to the theme of “contemporary archaeology”
THE WORKS
Entrecasa – In this series, Carlos Bittar superimposes the limits separating the public and the
private. This association of territories is materialized in the photographer’s faithful approach to
the different tendencies of the milieu .
Un Tiempo Ajeno –Pedro Barrail records time (objective and autonomous) in a photocalendar
based
on
curious
associations:
Mondays/Shawls;
Tuesdays/Shirts;
Wednesdays/Socks, etc.
La Lente y el Otro –The story told by Juan Brito’s photographs does not have a logical linear
narrative or a strictly documentary function in the widespread sense of the photo essay.
Construcción y Obscenidad - Claudia Casarino’s starting points are postcards referring to
Paraquay’s recent political past (usually using emblematic images from the regime of Alfredo
Stroessner, 1954-1989).
El Yavorai –Ruiz Nestosa’s images - based on direct photographic language - suggest a
return to the congenital artificiality of representing the natural. His landscapes are those
strange places where the food seems raw.
El Tótem Digital –Juan Carlos Meza’s digital montage suggests a paradox. It seeks to connect
the unlimited reproducibility of the digital image with the unique character of the ecological
object.
Los Límites de la Memoria – Natalia Patiño’s work starts from her own family photographs
or those of stangers, as both refer to everyday recording, personal memory, the opening out of
the subject in time.
Lo Personal y lo Político – The work of Jorge Sáenz is strongly related to photojournalism.
He is showing two essays published in Paraguay.
Hurtos y Reapropiaciones - Carlo Spatuzza produces a series using the medium as
performance, with dual results: these occur in an argument that develops within the digital
images and also – through their mounting – in their interaction with the other images
displayed.
34
Rituales Trashumantes – The Rituals, photo series by Gabriela Zuccolilo, repeats a sequence
of similar acts so that their fidelity to the identical achieves a desired result. With another logic
Rains and storms emphasises the violence of a meteorological event and its customary sudden
occurrence.
Javier Alcalá
Artists – Paraguayan Representation
Carlos Bittar - Asunción, Paraguay, 1961
Main Exhibitions:
2000 Tercer Mes de Fotografía Latinoamericana. Centro Cultural Pasaje Rocha,
La Plata, Argentina
1998 Fotografía Paraguaya. Dachau, Germany
1989 Nueve fotografos. Centro Cultural Paraguayo Americano, Asunción,
Paraguay
2002 Fin de Zona Urbana. Centro Cultural Citibank, Asunción, Paraguay (individual)
Carlo Spatuzza - 1966
Main Exhibitions:
2002 Los Argumentos. Arte Paraguayo de la Década de los 90. Corazonada en
Otra Versión. Instituto Cultural Juan de Salazar, Asunción, Paraguay
2001 16 Artists Paraguayos. Un Círculo Envenenado. Museo de Arte
Contemporáneo, Montevideo, Uruguay
1998 Confrontación Paraguayo Italiana. El Viaje: Ida y Vuelta. Palacio de la Santa
Cruz, Rome, Italy
Claudia Casarino - 1974
Main Exhibitions:
2002 Vis á Vis. Museo D’Arte di Nuoro, Italy
Tandem. Museo del Barro, Asunción, Paraguay
Braziers. Oxfordshire, England
2001 Pay Attention Please. Museo D’Arte di Nuoro, Italy
Gabriela Zuccolillo - Asunción, Paraguay, 1967
Main Exhibitions:
2002 De Lluvias y Tormentas. Los Argumentos. Artists Paraguayos de la Década de los 90. Instituto
Cultural Juan de Salazar, Asunción, Paraguay
2001 De Lluvias y Tormentas Al Sur del Lugar. Photo España 2001, Museo de America, Madrid,
Spain
2000 De Lluvias y Tormentas. Architecture Biennial, Venice, Italy
Jesús Ruiz Nestosa - 1941
Main Exhibitions:
35
2002 Celebración de la Ciudad. 25th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo
15 Artists de la Bienial de São Paulo en el Museo de Arte
Contemporáneo de Chile. Santiago, Chile
Al Sur del Lugar. 11 Artists del Paraguay. Museo de América, Madrid,
Spain
Jorge Sáenz - 1958
Main Exhibitions:
1998 Curitiba International Photography Biennial. Curitiba, Paraná
1994 Premio Casa de las Americas. Havana, Cuba
1992 Mother Jones Awards. San Francisco, USA
1994 Paraguay Visiones. Arquivo Fotográfico de Lisboa, Portugal (individual)
Juan Britos - 1967
Main Exhibitions:
2001 Al Sur del lugar. PhotoEspaña, Madrid, Spain
1998 Curitiba International Photography Biennial. Curitiba, Paraná
1990 Clinicas quiere vivir. Asunción, Paraguay
Juan Carlos Meza - 1965
Main Exhibitions:
2001 Al sur del lugar. PhotoEspaña 2001 Festival Internacional de Fotografia,
Museo de America, Madrid, Spain
1993 Encuentro de Fotografia Latinoamericana. Fundaimagen, CONAC, Caracas,
Venezuela
1989 Images of Silence. Photography from Latin America and the Caribbean in
the 80s. Museum of Modern Art of Latin America, Washington D.C., USA
Natalia Patiño - 1972
Main Exhibitions:
2000 III Salón Nacional de Arte Joven. Diario La Nación, Asunción, Paraguay
Premio Henri Matisse 2000. Centro Cultural de la Ciudad, Asunción,
Paraguay
1998 Artisti paraguayani e italiani a confronto. IILA, Rome, Italy
2002 Leyes de la Permanência. Asunción, Paraguay (ndividual)
Pedro Barrail - 1964
Main Exhibitions:
2003 First Latin American Video Art Exhibit. BID, Washington, USA; Rome, Italy
2002 Los Argumentos. Centro Cultural de España, Asunción, Paraguay
2001 3rd Mercosul Visual Arts Biennial. Fundação Biennial, Porto Alegre, Rio
Grande do Sul
Building Through Time. University of Miami, Miami, USA
36
2000 7th Havana Biennial. Centro Wilfredo Lam, Havana,Cuba
URUGUAY
Iconic exhibition – María Freire
Curator: Gabriel Peluffo
María Freire describes her work as “a route that follows the principles of universal geometric
abstraction developing its plastic organisation through particular formal solutions”. Thus, in
1950, the artist approached an art with no expressionistic barriers and a disciplined adherence
to geometric construction with strong convictions.
In 1945 in Uruguay she started her explorations into abstract art which emerged from group
experiments that she developed with her students at the Liceo de la Colónia de Sacramento. In
the 1950s she made contact with concrete and neo-concrete artists working in Brazil, such as
Amílcar de Castro, Luis Sacilotto, Lothar Charoux, Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark, María Leontina,
Flexor, Ivan Serpa and Helio Oiticica. María Freire was also linked to the Ulm school and the
teaching of Max Bill. This suggests that there existed a network of personal links between
artists, which was not only intimately related to Brazilian-Rio Plate regional concretism, but
also linked this movement with parallel ideas developed in Europe, particularly around the
historic Bauhaus-Ulm axis.
María Freire’s geometry maintained a continual dialogue between painting and sculpture
throughout her entire work. This geometry constructs form and space simultaneously, so that
the forms are often able to construct autonomous volumes, independent from the picture
plane. This morphological duality emerges from the transformations in her work. The first of
these appears between 1957 and 1960 when she travels to Europe. There she makes personal
contact with Moore, Vantongerloo, Vordemberge-Gildewart, Ferrant, Pevsner, Calder, and
sees Pollock’s work in the Kassel Documenta. María Freire starts to revise the sense of form in
its consistency with signs when she makes contact with medieval metalwork. This awakens the
artist’s interest in developing the geometric sign as a solid form.
From this point, María Friere’s painting seems to be devoted to the production and
reproduction of archetypal forms and gestures, that have a kind of genetic bareness. Its visual
appearance itself hints at the plastic exercises the artist uses to produce them. Analysing the last
40 years of María Friere’s output it is always possible to detect the dialogue between painting
and sculpture and a sort of specular counterpoint in which the forms move from volume to
plane and vice-versa. This may be why in the majority of sculptures produced after 1960 the
frontal dimension is predominant. In this group of work there remains what we can call the
plastic economy of the sign, faithful to the totally explicit strategy of schematization, which is
proud to be the sole subject of representation.
37
Gabriel Peluffo
María Freire (7/11/1917, Montevideo, Uruguay)
Early in her life María Friere discovered the pleasure of drawing. At the age of 21 she started to
study sculpture with Antonio Pena and later went on to the Círculo de Bellas Artes. In 1943
she abandoned her studies to follow her own personal direction in art. She moved to Cologne
in Germany where she lectured in Drawing and Art History. There she come into contact with
cubism and the forms of so-called “African art”; constructivism, neo-plasticism and the work
of artists like Lipchitz, Mondrian and Van Doesburg. At the end of the 1940s he artist had
worked for ten years with plaster and clay masks, which from 1945 had become a conscious
way of approaching formal synthesis through geometry.
In 1952 she met the Uruguayan painter José Pedro Costigliolo who had been solitarily making
inroads into geometric abstraction since 1946 and would fill a fundamental role in her life.
They exhibited together in Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo where they made
contacts with Brazilian artists working with neo-concretism and geometrical abstraction. They
travelled together to Europe between 1957 and 1960 which enabled them to encounter postwar avant-garde artists and works at first hand. From 1960-62 a few hesitations can be seen in
their works due to the strong presence of Franco-Iberico informalism. Freire returns to
“planism” three years later with the Capricórnio series which has little or no relation to her
previous work.
A visit to Córdoba, Argentina in 1967 enables her to return to the idea of the archetypal sign,
which had appeared nine years earlier. In the middle of the 1970s her work moves to another
form of planar investigations based on chromatic sequences contained within a rigorous
subdivision of the surface into orthogonal bands.
After the death of Costigliolo in 1985, María Friere entered a period of meditation that led her
to return to her work through a revision of the work itself. Series such as América Del Sur e El
Oro de Los Tigres emerged. “ The forms and styles of the past invaded my thoughts and forced
me to go back to painting. But they returned with demands for renewal, with demands for
another modernity”, says the artist.
Gabriel Peluffo
38
URUGUAY
National Representation
Curator: Gabriel Peluffo
Many Uruguayan artists – working with a variety of resources – share a coherent poetics with
an “archaeology of memory” (collective/individual) that links art with strategies of reidentification in society. We are not seeking to simply conform to the criterion of nationality
in the choice of artists, and we have selected a group that has had intellectual training and life
abroad as a way of intersecting international experience with Uruguayan identity. The selection
of works comprises three theoretical fields. The first establishes a strategy of discovery and
perpetuation of the image. They also construct a poetics of existence and disappearance (in
Paul Virilio’s sense), and furthermore, clearly show a politics of looking as criticism of power
Re-visitaciones: by Patricia Bentancur. The series shows a collection of iconographic objects
collected from childhood to adulthood, constructing social memory and stimulating reflection
about the object-symbol.
Ausencias y presencias: by Juan Angel Urruzola. This photographic exhibition shows the
construction of recollections and omissions that form part of regional memory. The capturing
of time permits a series of experiments with photography: the intervention of his own arm to
separate the observer from the observed, or the incorporation of one photograph inside
another.
Construciones y demoliciones: by Marco Maggi. Zona 1: 125 thousand sheets of paper form a
floor on which the spectator can walk. Zone 2: a confusion of various materials is exposed to light
forming a map interrupted with rhizomatous lines. The magic consists of transmitting information
showing only the mechanics of the statement.
Imagen-ex: by Ernesto Vila. Vila works with painting. Whether with water, paper, or
cardboard with urban drawings the artists seeks to question the classical idea of the picture
surface, seeking a fleeting, sometimes archaeological image recalling the visual memory of
urban Montevideo.
La marca y la mirada: by Carlos Capelán. Capelán’s work is as extensive and complex as it is
ideologically compact. His archaism is an anthropological memory that explores symbolic
strategies of power. In the work on show he questions praise as an instrument of power in the
way that it first appeared in Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness”.
Proyeto Vestidor: by Pablo Uribe. The artist seeks to capture the model’s identity, which is
only represented in its bureaucratic dimension, without anything else, such as clothes, and the
landscape; the mask and the context. In large video images Uribe develops an idea of mutant
identity that removes all referential context from the scene itself.
39
Gabriel Peluffo
Artists - Uruguayan Representation
Carlos Capelán - Montevideo, Uruguay, 1948
Main Exhibitions:
2002 Maps and Landscapes (the living-room), 1991-2002. Tilflukt/Refuge,
Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, Norway
Homage to Ola Billgren. Galerie Leger, Malmö, Sweden
1998 A painting representing space. 24th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo
At the speed of your steps. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada
2002 Onlyyou. Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden (individual)
Eisoptrophobia. Galleri s.e, Bergen, Norway (individual)
Low Tide /Technologies. Gary Nader Fine Arts, Miami, USA (individual)
Ernesto Vila - Montevideo, Uruguay, 1936
Main Exhibitions:
2003 Arte en Progresión. Encuentros sobre Tecnología y Experimentación Artística, Centro
Cultural San Martín, Buenos Aires, Argentina
2002 Paisaje Artificial. Molino de Pérez, Montevideo, Uruguay
1997 6th Havana Biennial. Havana, Cuba
2001 No abra ninguna igual. Club de Arte Molino de Pérez, Montevideo, Uruguay (individual)
1997 Museo Juan Zorrilla de San Martín, Montevideo, Uruguay (individual)
Juan Angel Urruzola - 1953
Main Exhibitions:
1994 8 Artistas y el libro. Casa Gandhi, Montevideo, Uruguay
1993 New york Critics AsociationTouring Exhibition, USA
1992 Granja Pepita. Fotofest, Houston, USA
2001
Miradas. El Ciudadano, Montevideo, Uruguay (individual)
2000
Miradas Ausentes. Átrio da Intendência Municipal de Montevideo, Uruguay
(individual)
Marco Maggi - Montevideo, Uruguay, 1957
Main Exhibitions:
2003 Vision & Revision , Works on Paper Since 1960. Boston Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston, USA
2002 25th São Paulo Biennial. Biennial Foundation, São Paulo
Europa/America: Selección de la Biennial de San Pablo. Museo de Arte
Contemporáneo de Chile, Santiago, Chile
40
Yesteryears. Hales Gallery, London, England
2003 Constructing & Demolishing. Cristinerose &Josee Bienvenu Gallery,
New York, USA (individual)
2002 HotBed. Sala Uno, Rome, Italy
Pablo Uribe - Montevideo, Uruguay, 1962
Main Exhibitions:
2003 Pretérito Presente. Centro Cultural San Martín, Buenos Aires, Argentina
2002 Trampas 02. Subte. Municipal de Exposições. Montevideo, Uruguay
Diez Grabadores Uruguayos. Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, Montevideo, Uruguay
2002 Proyecto Vestidor. Galería Pancho Fierro, Lima, Peru (individual)
Patricia Bentancur - Montevideo, Uruguay, 1963
Main Exhibitions:
2003 25 hrs. The Video Art Foundation, London, England; Barcelona, Spain
2002 Interfaces_02 Arte Mediatico. Instituto Goethe; Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales,
Montevideo, Uruguay
XIX Festival de Cine y Video. Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Columbia
IV Salón y Coloquio Internacional de Arte Digital. Centro Cultural Pablo de la Torriente
Brau, Havana, Cuba
Ricardo Lanzarini - Montevideo, Uruguay, 1963
Main Exhibitions:
2002 Comer o no Comer. Centro de Arte Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain.
50° Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales. Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales,
Montevideo, Uruguay
2001 Cité Internationale des Arts de Paris. Paris, France
Políticas de las diferencias. Arte Iberoamericano de fin de siglo. Touring Exhibition
2000 Diálogo interguisal: la orquesta de los guisos criollos. 7th Havana Biennial,
Cuba (individual)
1999 El Baile. Directione Regionale des Affaires Culturelles des Pays de la Loire,
France (individual)
41
MEXICO
Iconic Exhibiton – José Clemente Orozco
Curator: Agustín Arteaga
A little more than 50 years after his death, José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) continues not
only to attract the attention and fascination of connoisseurs and aficionados, but also to
provoke disconcertion and surprise in those who see his work.
The artist created an ambivalent aesthetic, full of critical, philosophical and mystical references,
– marked by ideas closer to western European zeitgeist than to local production. Orozco was a
painter, muralist (with Diego Rivera and David Alvaro Siqueiros, he was part of the trilogy of
the Mexican renaissance), printmaker, caricaturist and writer and remained the most
universalistic of the masters of the first generation of the Mexican School.
In maturity he became an anti-hero of the culture that freely shifted from light to shade,
establishing links between several opposites: social contrasts, rational man with his “animal”
self. He questions coincidences, reveals passions and weaknesses.
“A painting is a poem and nothing else. A poem full of relationships between forms, in
the same way that other poems are full of relationships between words, sounds or ideas.
Sculpture and architecture are also relationships between forms. And the word “forms”
includes colour, tone, proportion, line etc…”
Jose Clemente Orozco
The Orozco exhibition was conceived based on this phrase, with the aim of emphasizing the
importance of his work as one of the most important painters in the history of 20th century
art. The visitor will find a succinct reflection about the aesthetic and human concerns of the
painter through the mediation of historians and critics, with his works grouped around the
themes he dealt with throughout his career.
In “La Casa de Las Lágrimas”, the artist approaches the decadence of woman, whom he
considers to be an object of moral and physical abuse confronted by a world taken over by
machismo and violence; while in “La Revolución, el dolor y la desolación” , Orozco records his
emotional experience during turbulent periods of Mexican history; in the “El Cuerpo” sector,
his work is focused on the concrete interpretation of the spiritual and physical fragility of the
human condition. The exhibition is completed by modules linked to religious syncretism (“El
Misticismo” ) and the denunciation of the fascism of the period (“El Poder”).
Agustín Arteaga
42
José Clemente Orozco (Zapotlán, Mexico, 1883 - Mexico City, Mexico, 1949)
Considered one of the greatest painters of the Mexican vanguard, Orozco moved to Mexico
City as a child. He studied at the National School of fine Arts where he met the printmaker
José Guadalupe Posada whose influence marked his entire work.
From 1910 to 1916, the year of his first one-person exhibition, he made caricatures, was part of
a group of illustrators and painted in watercolour and oils. With the renaissance of mural
painting in 1922, Orozco took his first steps and painted the walls of the Escola Nacional
Preparatória, the old Jesuit college of San Ildelfonso. The series deals with conquest,
colonization and revolution in Mexico. The political and social themes that he developed in his
large murals led to Orozco being considered as a visual interpreter of the history of Latin
America
More specifically he is an astute narrator of the history of Mexico, depicting the indigenous
world, the European conquistadors, full of heroic and religious ideas, but overflowing with
violence, the view of the victims, the growth of the cities, dictatorship. The artist brings an
heroic style to the service of such themes. It is founded on realism, consciously linked to
Mexican artistic traditions and a violent dynamism. His art flourished during the seven years he
lived in the United States, from 1927 –1934, where he painted murals in institutions such as
Pomona College, California, and the Baker Library at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.
In the 1940s Orozco’s canvases showed characteristics that had already been seen in his
murals, such as diagonal lines and the colour grey. He worked with printmaking between 1935
and 1944, and with lithography at three different times between 1926 and 1935. In the last
years of his life, a simplification in approach can be seen, which probably reflects the search for
a more dramatic and violent style, even closer to expressionism.
43
MEXICO
National Representation
Curatorship: Rogelio Edgardo Ganado Kim
When we walk around Latin-American metropolises – Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Havana,
Mexico – we confront recurrent phenomenon in the so called third world. We will probably
come across a series of things that are in a state of disuse, have stopped working, or are not
finished, because some social or political class has considered them worthless.
What is rubbish in some areas, but in the first world would be recycled, is in our region used in
its form and space acquiring double or multiple functions and identities. An abandoned car
becomes a home – the graffitied doors become signs, the seats become armchairs. Ruined
buildings become hostels and vacant lots become improvised car parks.
These revived “corpses” acquire a new meaning and use when retrieved and removed from
their context, in a process similar to what happens in archaeology. Today in Mexico some
artists have taken on – with no scientific pretensions- the methodologies that lead to reflection
about objects, structures and practices that seem to perpetuate in our urban world.
The “archeologisation” performed by contemporary artists involves philosophy, anthropology,
economy, sociology and politics. It is a way of depicting Latin-American reality, which with
skill and intelligence can result in an art that contests the homogenisation of the ways art is
produced in the metropolises. At the same time it creates works without the recurrent folkloric
flavour given to be emblematic of the art of the region.
Clearly, Mexican art is not restricted to this theme, and neither does this selection serve to
exemplify it. The intention of this curatorship is to approach some works that link us to other
realities and similar problematics in Latin America. Not all the artists are Mexican, since the
reception and integration of immigrants into the mestizo population of our country has been
most successful.
Sounds, images, objects, chromatic scales, vehicles, and even the remains of corpses are used as
raw material for the artists to recreate their own urban scenes from where these elements were
taken.
Rogelio Edgardo Ganado Kim
Artists - Mexican Representation
44
Betsabeé Romero -1963
Main Exhibitions:
2002 Géneros en Tránsito. Centre Culturel du Mexique, Paris, France
Mesoamérica: Oscilaciones y Artificios. Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno,
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain
2001 Derby Demolition. Arbis Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands
2003 On Tires. New Jersey Museum of Art. New York, USA (individual)
2002 Body Shop. Ramis Barquet Gallery, New York, USA (individual)
Claudia Fernández - 1965
Main Exhibitions:
2001 Politicas de la Diferecia, Arte Iberoamericano de Fin de Siglo. Generalitat
Valenciana, Valencia, Spain
2002 Contemporary Mexican Artists. San Diego State University, California, USA
2001 Panorámico. Espacio 3, Mexico City, Mexico (individual)
1998 Aqui, afuera. Museo de Monterey, Mexico (individual)
Colectivo Tercerunquinto
Julio Cesar Castro (1976), Gabriel Cázares (1978) e Rolando Flores (1975)
Main Exhibitions:
2003 Instant City. Centre Culturel du Mexique, Paris, France
2002 Sensitive Negotiations. Instituto Cultural de Mexico en Miami, USA
Zebra Crossing. Haus der kulturen Der Welt, Berlin, Germany
Enrique Jezik - 1961
Main Exhibitions:
2002 Zebra Crossing. Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany
Teresa Margolles-Enrique Ježik. Galerie L’Oeil de Poisson, Montreal,
Canada
2002 Sensitive Negotiations. Instituto Cultural de Mexico, Miami, United States
2001 Asamblea. Centre Culturel du Mexique, Paris, France.
2000 Arte Contemporáneo de Mexico. Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary
2002 Sécurité. Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers, France (individual)
Fernando Llanos - 1974
Main Exhibitions:
2001 Cuatro: form & light in cyberspace. California Museum of Photography, Riverside, USA
2000 Momenta, Arte Electrónico. Centro Nacional de las Artes, Mexico City, Mexico
1999 I, and my circumstance (Mobility in Contemporary Mexican Art). Montreal
Museum of Fine Arts, Canada
Francis Alÿs - 1959
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Main Exhibitions:
2001 Da Adversidade Vivemos. ARC/ Museé d’art Moderne de la Ville de
Paris, France
The Whitechapel Centenary. Whitechapel Gallery, London, England
Subject Plural: Crowds in Contemporary Art. Contemporary Arts Museum,
Houston, USA
2001 Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Switzerland (individual)
The Last Clown. Lisson Gallery, London, England (individual)
Museé Picasso, Antibes, France (individual)
Richard Moszka - 1968
Main Exhibitions:
2003 8th Havana Biennial. Centro Cultural Wilfredo Lam, Havana, Cuba
2002 X Bienial de Fotografía Centro de la Imagen. Mexico City, Mexico
Gráfica actual. SNAP Galery, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
2001 Ubicaciones. Museo Universitario Contemporáneo de Arte,
Mexico City , Mexico
Mutations, la Vidéo Mexicaine Actuele. Palais des Arts, Toulouse, France
2002 Sobas. Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City, Mexico (individual)
2000 Ticks. Mercer Union Platform Program, Toronto, Canada (individual)
Teresa Margolles - 1963
Main Exhibitions:
2003 II Biennial de Gotemburgo. Gottenburg, Sweden
Banquete. Zentrum für Kunst unt Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe,
Germany
Espetacular. Centro Cultural Español, Mexico City, Mexico
2002 Mexico: Sensitive Negotiations .Consulado General de Mexico, Miami,
USA
2003 Das Leichentuch. Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (individual)
Teresa Margoles. Galerie Peter Kitchmann, Zurich, Switzerland (individual)
2002 Edificio Intervenido. Plaza San Mateo, Lucca, Italy (individual)
MERCOSUL BIENNIAL
History
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In the first half of the 1990s a group of artists, business people and politicians from Rio
Grande do Sul met to launch the start of the Mercosul Visual Arts Biennial. The businessman
Jorge Gerdau Johannpeter led the group which in December 1995 organized a committee
composed of various representatives from Rio Grande do Sul society, coordinated by Maria
Benites Moreno.
The group met for several months of discussion and ended up proposing the creation of a
private foundation. On the suggestion of Mr. Johannpeter, Justo Werlang was nominated for
the presidency of the Mercosul Visual Arts Biennial.
The 1st Mercosul Visual Arts Biennial was launched on July 11, 1996. This first edition was
curated by the art critic Frederico Morais from Minas Gerais who has lived for many years in
Rio de Janeiro. He has written dozens of books, as well as essays and criticism published in the
communication media. He chose the Argentinean Alejandro Xul Solar to be the artist of
honour in the 1st Mercosul Biennial.
The figures from the 1st Mercosul Biennial offered some indication of the future of the
exhibition: 842 artworks, 275 artists, 7 countries, 11 museum spaces, 11 ephemeral urban
interventions, 289.502 visitors to the museum spaces and 149 thousand arranged visits, more
than 30 thousand participants in the Creative Workshops.
The 2nd Mercosul Biennial was organised under the presidency of Dr. Ivo Nesralla, the general
curatorship of Fábio Magalhães and assistant curatorship of Leonor Amarante. Iberê Camargo,
from Rio Grande do Sul was chosen to be the artist of honour, and was given an excellent
exhibition of his work in the Rio Grande do Sul Museum of Art (MARGS). The same museum
also showed an exhibition entitled “Picasso, Cubists and Latin America”, as the historical
section.
Apart from these exhibitions and spaces, the 2nd Biennial also revealed a new space in the
State capital; the old sheds by the city’s river port warehouses, which were practically unknown
to the general public, and which housed the contemporary art exhibition.
In the same spirit of showing the city to its inhabitants and visitors, the 3rd Mercosul Biennial
which took place between October and December 2001, revealed other places, such as the São
Pedro Psychiatric Hospital – where packed performances took place nightly during the first
week of the Biennial – and the banks of the Guaíba, where a real Container City was built to
house the contemporary section.
This edition of the Biennial also offered an historical section with portraits and self-portraits by
the Mexican Diego Rivera; a show of paintings and graphic work by the Norwegian Edvard
Munch; and parallel exhibitions such as Chinese art, and the young Israeli living in Denmark,
Tal R.
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At the conclusion of the third edition, the Mercosul Visual Arts Biennial had won the applause
of the public and specialist critics who had seen it as one of the most significant exhibitions of
contemporary Latin American Art.
The number of visitors reached 603,682, a figure which was partly due to free admission. Of
these, 115,500 people, some 20% of the total, had guided visits to the exhibitions. A total of
139 schools and educational institutions booked and visited the exhibition spaces with the
assistance of monitors who provided access to information and facilitated and enriched the
reading of the works.
From the third edition, the Mercosul Biennial created an administrative mechanism within the
Foundation. The position of vice-president was established, who would accompany and
experience the working procedure of the exhibition since he or she would be indicated for the
presidency of the following edition.
Thus, the president of this edition of the Biennial, Renato Malcon, was able to work for the 4th
Biennial during the process of the previous one. This meant that, when taking over on April 15
this year, Mr Malcon and the curator general had already been chosen and had a Biennial
project in progress.
In the same way his vice-president, Justo Werlang, is able to follow the entire management
of the fourth edition and to work in order to facilitate the process of the next show, which
is programmed for 2005.
CURATOR AND PRESIDENT PROFILES
NELSON AGUILAR – General curator 4th Mercosul Biennial
Nelson Aguilar, was born in São Paulo in 1945. He is a graduate from the Department of
Philosophy in the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Humanities of the University of São
Paulo (USP). He also has a doctorate from the Faculté de Philosophie de l’Université Jean
Moulin (Lyon III).
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His resumé includes teaching at the Universities of Campinas and São Paulo; general
curatorship of the exhibition “Brazil, 500 years of Visual Art”, 1997/2002; general curatorship of
the São Paulo Biennial Foundation 1992/6; and researcher for the Calouste Gulbenkian
Foundation (Portugal), in Lisbon and Paris, 1976/78 and 1980.
He has been a member of the Brazilian Association of Art Critics since 1990, and the
Association Internationale de Critiques d’Art since 1995. He has also published “England in
sight” in “Experiment Experiência Art in Brazil 1958-2000”, The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford;
“Nine Times Brazil” in “Brazil Body and Soul”, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Nova
York
As a curator he worked on Exposição Brasil 500 anos Artes Visuais, 1997/2002; “Modernidad
Brasil”, “Mostra do Redescobrimento; “Experiment Experiência Art in Brazil 1958-2000”, The
Museum of Modern Art, Oxford and “Brazil Body and Soul”, The Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum.
FRANKLIN ESPATH PEDROSO – Curator of the Brazilian Representation at the 4th
Mercosul Biennial
49
Franklin Espath Pedroso studied architecture at the University of Santa Ursula, Rio de Janeiro,
and has a Master’s degree in Art History and Criticism from The Federal University of Rio de
Janeiro. He also specialised in Art Administration at New York University. He was the curatorgeneral of the Rediscovery Exhibition in São Paulo from January 1999 to December 2001
He has also curated exhibitions at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, and the
National Museum of Women in the Arts. He has designed and arranged several other
exhibitions and also coordinated the hanging of the special rooms at the 23rd São Paulo
Biennial, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Goya, Tomie Ohtake, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol.
His international experience extends to the production of exhibitions in important institutions
in New York, Washington, Chicago, Paris, Bordeaux, Glasgow, Cologne, Seville, Lisbon and
Copenhagen.
RENATO MALCON – President of the Mercosul Visual Arts Biennial .
Renato Malcon is from Porto Alegre. He was born in December 1955. He is qualified in
Judicial and Social Science from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, with studies on
Business Administration and Economy. He is currently President of the Mercosul Visual Arts
Biennial Foundation and Administrative Advisor to the Foundation, of which he has been a
member since its inception, and also a member of the Curatorial Advisors of the Iberê
Camargo Foundation, and the Advisors of the Porto Alegre Symphony Orchestra Foundation
At the start of the 1990s he was head of the Association of Sales Directors of Brazil, in 1992/3,
at a time when the institution was one of the largest business entities in Rio Grande do Sul,
and he was director of the Rio Grande do Sul Liberal Institute from 1989 to 92. Mr Malcon
was also the founder and vice-president of the Institute of Business Studies in 1987/88. He is
currently a shareholder and controller of Malcon Financeira S. A. – Sociedade de Crédito,
Financiamento e Investimento, of Salomão Malcon Administrações e Participações Ltda. and
Distribuidora de Títulos e Valores Mobiliários Madel Ltda., businesses that are part of the
Conglomerado Financeiro-Imobiliário Malcon.
Renato Malcon conceived and co-ordinated the First Modernity Meeting in 1990 and the 2nd
Modernity Meeting in 1996; the Rio Grande do Sul Sales Conference in 1992; the First Rio
Grande do Sul Marketing conference in 1993; First Liberty Forum in 1988.
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Sponsors 4th Mercosul Biennial
Promotors
Federal Government – Ministry of Culture – Rouanet Law
State Government – Culture Secretariat – LIC
Mercosul Visual Arts Biennial Foundation
Masters Sponsors
Gerdau
Santander Cultural
Petrobras
Sponsors
Ipiranga, Lojas Renner, Refap, Souza Cruz, Varig, VIVO, Vonpar/Coca-Cola
Educational Action
Sponsors
Tramontina
Patrons
Dellanno
Ferramentas Gerais
GM
Grupo Habitasul
Rossi Incorporação e Construção
4th Mercosul Visual Arts Biennial Patrons
Amersham, Box 3, CIEE, Convention Bureau, Dez Propaganda, Digitel, Isdralit, Ivo Rizzo
Construtora e Incorporadora, Jornal do Comércio, Juenemann & Associados - Auditores e
Consultores, Laboratório Piracema de Design, Malcon, Master Hotéis, Montejo - Corretora
de Seguros, Npark, Panvel Farmácias, Parceiros Voluntários, Perto S.A., Plaza Hotéis, Pop
Rock, Stemac, Tintas Renner, Tumelero e Zarpellon & Araújo Arquitetos - assessoria em
arquitetura
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