Info

Synopsis

Invited to think about a program that would gather Brazilian artists and dialogue with Hangar’s program, I quickly thought about working with people who research the use of computer-generated images, commonly called in English as CGI. Why? Like several other artists in Brazil and globally, video – and the use of digital media – occupies a giant space in visual arts production. The supposed ease and cheapness of technologies such as cell phones and computers – certainly stimulated, for example, by the social distancing provided by the COVID-19 pandemic – increasingly encourage artists with diverse existential interests to focus on moving images. Distant, however, from a more seen documental perspective using the camera – either recording their bodies in actions that refer to video dance or looking at the “other”in dialogue with documentary cinema – artists who create images using software are usually immersed in fantasy, fiction and, not infrequently, literature. All the artists here – coming not only from different regions of Brazil but also with a slight generational discrepancy – are interested in the notion of ancestry, antiquity, history, and the past. Having Textual production as a core element of their research, “Kebranto” by Jonas Van and Juno B and “@ilusão” by Vitória Cribb create narratives whose primary interest is non-normative bodies represented by “monsters” collectively molded by Brazilian folklore and by the reflection on avatars and control. The narratives around modernist monuments in Brazil, meanwhile, attracted the attention of Guerreiro do Divino Amor in his “A cristalização de Brasília” and of Darks Miranda and pedro frança in “Ibiritaquera.” Both works play with science fiction through absurd configurations of colonialism in the country’s public space. More Interested in the notion of glitch and how this “noise” can be a space for experimentation and reflection on the problems of late capitalism, biarritzzz, Gabriel Junqueira, and Marcus Deusdedit are united in their research. “BVGO,” “Tropical landscape solutions,” and “elefante Na sala, monolito embaixo da cama” deal with the relations between violence, landscape, urbanism, and architecture. The pyramids of Egypt are one of the greatest symbol of particular ideas of the ancient and notions of ancestry. By placing them alongside rendering – an English verb used to designate the moment that editing, creating, and processing images software takes to close digital processing – I propose a meeting between different temporalities that rub against each other.”Rendering Pyramids,” therefore, is a video program that invites artists who deal with the digital to reflect on how to fold, shape, invent, fragment, and even implode fictional charges from the “past” with both feet in the present and through a visual culture that, in the blink of an eye, could still be called “futuristic.”

@ilusão, 2020, by Vitória Cribb

In the work @ illusion the repetition of images guides the reflection on the states of ecstasy, anxiety, stress, tiredness and loneliness that continuously affect us when interacting with the other and with the algorithm, the one that determines our hierarchical position in the digital environment through the curves of engagement. In the face of 2020 events, the artist faces two extremes of repetition in our society. Drawing a parallel between the repetition of violence, in a society shaped by racism, and its investigation of the content loopings to which we are exposed daily in the midst of early virtual socialization and algorithmic racism.

Kebranto, 2021-22, by Jonas Van e Juno B

A snake travels through dreamlike digital landscapes and also static images of the Amazon rainforest, narrated in a cyclical repetition of a time proposed in dreams by the snake. The film narrates a radical fantasy, a possibility of bodily and temporal transmutation from the encounter with the snake that feeds on eyes, which, after eating so many of them, transforms itself into living fire. The human beings who look into the serpent’s eyes are irreversibly transformed.

Ibiritaquera, 2016, by Darks Miranda and pedro frança

In the fiction presented by pedro and darks, one imagines the restoration of the original vegetation around the colonial monument to the Bandeirantes, a soggy and swampy region, grounded by urbanization processes, including the establishment of the Ibirapuera park, designed by Oscar Niemeyer. With the explosion of the current urban infrastructure, the new mangrove becomes the stage for agroforestry experimentation, rescuing the possibilities of imagining and occupying the soil. The fiction articulated in this project seeks to incorporate destruction and imagination as positive tools for the collective processes of memory, mourning and elaboration of the ghosts of our landscape and violent historical processes.

BVGO BVGO – Boas Vindas Game Over, 2017, by biarritzzz

By discussing the idea that “in the game of reality, wins the most surreal” I question the political configurations in which I saw the passage of the years 2016/2017, electoral year in Brazil, when we faced the switch from years of left wing governments to a right wing openly nazist fashioned one. Mixing documental images with scenes from virtual reality games, the news are narrated by a journalist who, at the heights of the 21st century, informs that escaping prisoners set fire in a cane plantation field. Meanwhile, a digital character from the American game GTA sets fire on a parking lot full of cars. Indigenous people hit military police with traditional arrows at the state of Minas Gerais and who watches everything is also playing, and earning points. SPAMM – SuPer Art Morderne Musée Official collection.

A cristalização de Brasília, 2019, by Guerreiro do Divino Amor

Fourth chapter of the Superfictional World Atlas, The Crystallization of Brasília explores the idea of the future as a petrified past. In an accelerated geological time, centuries crystallize in a few months in the form of a city. This process is driven by the force of mystical rationalism, who has the power to embalm ideas and social structures so that they last forever.

Tropical landscape solutions, 2017, by Gabriel Junqueira

“Tropical landscape solutions” is a narrative built with archive footage found on youtube. The artist creates a fictional guided meditation using narration as a guiding thread, while the images take opposite directions.

elefante na sala, monolito embaixo da cama by Marcus Deusdedit

“Elephant in the room, monolith under the bed” is an audiovisual piece built mainly from the ideas of sampling and montage. The work is an orchestra of images and sounds that, displaced from their context, build discontinuity and contradiction in an attempt to elaborate on the relationship between architecture and the black culture built in the diaspora.

Raphael Fonseca (1988, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is a researcher in the areas of art history, criticism, curatorship and education. He has a special interest in the relations between art, visual culture and history in their various conceptions. The juxtaposition of different temporalities and how this can trigger contemporary reflections for audiences is of great importance in his practice. Humor, absurdity, pop culture and the notion that an exhibition relates to the ideas of assembly, set design and spectacle has grown among his research interests. Fonseca is the first curator of modern and contemporary Latin American art at the Denver Art Museum, USA. He worked as a curator at MAC Niterói between 2017 and 2020. He holds a doctoral degree in Art Critic and Art History from the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), and has received the Marcantonio Vilaça Curatorship Award (2015). Among his recent exhibitions are Who tells a tale adds a tail (Denver Art Museum, 2022), Raio-que-o-parta: fictions of modernity in Brazil (Sesc 24 de Maio, 2022), The silence of tired tongues (Framer Framed, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2022), Sweat (Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, 2021-2022), To-and-fro (Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil – São Paulo, Brasília, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte, 2019–2020), Lost and found (ICA Singapore, 2019), Sonia Gomes – life is reborn, always (MAC Niterói, 2018), and The sun teaches us that history is not everything (Osage Art Foundation, Hong Kong, 2018).

biarritzzz (1994, Fortaleza, Brazil) is a transmedia artist who works in-between languages, translations and codes. She questions technicity versus amateurism and science versus magic in the creation of realities, as her work remixes pop culture, video art, meme politics, video game aesthetics and poetry with new media. She investigates the countless cultural codes from this intersection and its cryptographies from non-hegemonic bodies as tools of power. One of the first Brazilian exponents of GIF art, she has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Satélite platform (Pivô Arte e Pesquisa), AIR Gallery, Centro Cultural São Paulo, The Wrong Bienalle, FILE, IMS (Instituto Moreira Salles), The Shed, among other festivals and collective exhibitions. She is part of the permanent online collections of SPAMM (Super Art Moderne Museum), HIPOCAMPO, and MIS-SP (Sound and Image Museum of São Paulo). Is currently part of the artists board of the international projects Unfinished Camp and Amplify D.A.I. (Digital Arts Initiative). In 2022-2023 integrates Ventre program, at Hoa Gallery.

Darks Miranda was born in Fortaleza, Brazil, in 1985. She currently lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.

Darks proposes weird, monstrous, fictional and fruitful works with reference in Horror, Sci-Fi and Fantasy imagery. Using editing and montage as procedure and language, she makes use of different media and formats, such as installation, sculpture, found footage video and performance to create fictions, moods and universes. She has shown in spaces such as A Gentil Carioca, Galeria Jaqueline Martins, Galeria Athena, Rio de Janeiro’s Paço Imperial, MAR – Rio Art Museum, MAM – Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art, Oscar Niemeyer Museum, SESC Pinheiros, São Paulo’s Municipal Theater, São Paulo’s Brazilian Cinematheque, Centro Internacional das Artes José de Guimarães (Portugal), KISPAS (Belgium), Archive Kabinett (Germany), Filmhuis Cavia (The Netherlands), University of Applied Arts Vienna (Austria) and Tate Modern (UK). In 2019 she had her first solo show, “mulher desfruta”, at Galeria Cândido Portinari, Rio de Janeiro. In 2020 she developed commissioned works for both Instituto Moreira Salles and The Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. In 2022 she participated in the FAAP Art Residency (São Paulo) and opened her second solo show “A Dangerous Night in Vulcano Island”, at Carpintaria (Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel), Rio de Janeiro. Right now she is preparing her first solo show in São Paulo, at Projeto Vênus Art Gallery.

Gabriel Junqueira (1992, Fortaleza, Brazil) is a multimedia artist who explores relations between body, technology and materiality in media such as digital images, sculptures and installations. Seeking inspiration from corporate architecture and landscaping concepts, the artist creates fictional environments, where figurative elements are rearranged to the point of abstraction.

Guerreiro do Divino Amor (1983, Geneva, Switzerland) lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He earned his MA in Architecture from École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Grenoble, France, and La Cambre, Brussels (2006). He has had solo exhibitions at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2022); Centro de Arte Contemporânea W, Ribeirão Preto (2019); and Paço das artes at Museu da Imagem e do Som, São Paulo (2018). He has been included in group exhibitions at Frestas – Trienal de Artes, Sorocaba (2020/21); Instituto Moreira Salles, Rio de Janeiro (2020); Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte (2019); and Museu de Arte Brasileira da Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, São Paulo (2019); among others. He is the recipient of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Award Grant (2021); the PIPA Prize (2019); and the 24th Salão Anapolino de Arte Prize (2019). He was in residence at DAAD in Berlin between 2021 and 2022 and at Casa da Cultura da América Latina at Universidade de Brasília in 2018. Divino Amor will represent Switzerland in the next Venice Biennial in 2024.

Jonas Van (1989, Fortaleza, Brazil) is a transnordestino artist and researcher. His practice is situated between transmutations, gender disobedience, language, speculative fiction, spirituality and ecologies, using sound-video, ephemeral installations and poetry. His work proposes intimate fictional and theoretical narratives, linguistic and temporal fractures from an anti-colonial perspective. He has been in residency in Mexico, Bolivia, Portugal, Spain, Brazil and Switzerland. Winner of the Helvetia Art Prize 2022. He is currently studying at the Master in Visual Arts – CCC (Critical, Curatorial and Cybernetic studies) at the HEAD – Geneva. Lives and works in Geneva (CH).

Juno B (1982, Fortaleza, Brazil) is a transdisciplinary artist. In their work propose experiments and dialogues based on non-hegemonic discourses and hypotheses of mutual ways of being in the world. Their practice transits between transespecific fictions and mutations, gender disobedience, toxic conflicts and landscape migration, tensioning notions of the (in)visible and the limits between aesthetics, ethics and politics. Recently joined the Pivô Research Program, São Paulo (2021), received a nomination for the 2022 Pipa Prize and was selected in the 100 Artists organized by Artlink and Sudkulturfonds. They have participated in artistic residencies in Brazil, Bolivia and Switzerland.

Marcus Deusdedit (1997, Belo Horizonte, Brazil) holds a degree in Architecture and Urbanism from the Federal University of Minas Gerais. His practice elaborates on possible updates of the production of architecture and design from the aesthetic displacement of its codes. The result of this investigation is | re-lab.xyz |, a work of continued research that houses, digitally and virtually, the
experiments around this process. It was awarded by the 3rd Camelo Contemporary Art Festival and was resident on 8th Bolsa Pampulha. Currently, he is interested in image and video editing and the elaboration of installations as languages.

pedro franca is an Artist and member of Ueinzz Theatre Group

An artist and member of Ueinzz Theatre Group, pedro studied at the School of Visual Arts of Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro between 2001 and 2005 and holds a Master Degree in Social History at PUC- Rio (Rio de Janeiro). Since 2011, pedro frança has been working as an artist in a variety of media, mainly paintings, text and video. His work engages in schizo and metonymical rearrangements of images and objects, in both individual and collaborative practices, and in virtuality as tool for projecting, healing and imagining. Since 2011, frança has been a part of Ueinzz Theatre Group, a theatre collective which gathers people with all sorts of psychic life experiences. With the group, has participated in the development and performance of the works Cais de Ovelhas (Noreadymademen) [2012-2015], Gravidade Zero (Zero Gravity) [2015-2017], and Mobedique HORS ACVE [2018- ongoing]

Vitória Cribb (b. 1996, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) graduated from Superior School of Industrial at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Daughter of a Haitian father and Brazilian mother, Cribb creates and experiments through digital and visual narratives that permeate techniques such as: Animations and CGI image development, Augmented Reality and Immersive Environments for the web. The artist uses the digital environment as a way to explain her investigations and reflections crossed by her subconscious while investigating social behavior in face of the development of new visual information technologies, in contemporary society. The transposition of her thinking through the immateriality presented in digital are central points in the works developed by the artist in recent years. In 2022 Vitória Cribb got nominated and awarded the PIPA PRIZE Award – A relevant Brazilian Contemporary Art Prize; In the same year Cribb was nominated to CIFO-Ars Electronica AWARD a prize with focus on Latin American Artists organized by Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) and Ars Electronica Institution; In 2021 “@illusion”, a film and digital installation by the artist, were mentioned and gained prominence in reviews such as XR panel from The Art Newspaper. Cribb’s work has been featured in international exhibitions such like: Who Tells a Tale Adds a Tail (Denver Art Museum, 2022); Perfect Body (Esc Medien Kunst Labor, Graz, Austria) ; The Silence of Tired Tongues (Framer Framed, Amsterdam, 2022); Hotel Blue (Vellum LA, Los Angeles, 2022); Oh I Love Brazilian Women (Apexart, New York, 2022) ; Futuração (Galeria Aymoré, Rio de Janeiro, 2021); Disembodied Behaviors (Bitforms Gallery, New York , 2020); The Brazil that I Want (Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, online, 2020); Beginning of the Century (Jaqueline Martins Gallery, São Paulo, 2019).

Currently running BTWN STUDIOS – an XR Production Company – Vitória has developed projects for key names in the creative technology industry: HBO; Women Rise NFT Project; IoDF; Spectacles; Snap Inc.; Mutantboard Agency; Reality House Magazine x Mahalia.