The inclusion of Fraser’s lost work is a pointed bit of institutional self-reflection by Visconti.
The latter waxes lyrical about the importance of corporate sponsorship, that back then extended to companies like Kodak being given concessions to sell their wares within the show itself. With her trademark satire, the American artist interrogated the Bienal organisation itself through a series of pointed interviews with curator Paulo Herkenhoff and other such luminaries including Brazil’s then-culture minister. Nearby is a series of ‘news reports’ made by Andrea Fraser for the 1998 Bienal, intended to be broadcast on Brazilian television, but never aired.
The composition, which may have sounded sweet (if cynical) in the voices of children, feels grim when sung by wearied adults. Meanwhile fires rage through the Amazon – driven by deforestation carried out with the tacit approval of President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration a new attack on indigenous land-rights is being orchestrated through the courts as I write and inflation is going through the roof, leaving the always precarious working population floundering.Įven the arts, so often perceived as a bastion of optimism in a land that is frequently the locus of negative critique, are sullied in Visconti’s introductory picture: up the ramp to the first of the three further floors of the Oscar Niemeyer-designed Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion – home to the Bienal since 1957 – the visitor will find Ana Adamović’s My Country Is the Most Beautiful of All (2011–13), a film that reunites the members of a 1970s Yugoslavian choir to sing a song steeped in nationalism. The exhibition, Though It’s Dark, Still I Sing, which opens this weekend, was delayed a year as Brazil sleepwalked its way towards becoming one of the pandemic’s most rampant hotspots, a negligent far-right government leaving over half a million dead. Photo: © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São PauloĬurator Jacopo Crivelli Visconti’s opening gambit captures the sombre mood of Brazil in 2021. Installation view of Arjan Martins’ new installation at the Bienal de São Paulo.
0 kommentar(er)
