Ricardo Càstro

/in , , ,

São Roque, 1972. Lives between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro

Abravanar is a verb invented to designate modes of unleashing vital energy through interaction with elements of cultural memory, sometimes abstract and sometimes clearly harnessed to popular festivities, religious cults and the mass media. The abravaner may expand the self through the sensory experience of colors and light, musical chants, and the receptive, perspiring, connected body. Ricardo Càstro has been abravaning since the early 2000s, and this has yielded artistic and spiritual manifestations, both his own (and often privately so) and of others, be they partners or publics, to whom he offers beauty in return for empathy and exchange.

Wava consists of three portals: Platinum song, Stair lip and Coffee table. In silver, gold and crystal, respectively, the three works propose meditation rituals. Once activated in their totality (as the artist intends), they heighten our perception of an invisible, high-frequency wave that spreads and intensifies. The stirred wave spills into Sorocaba, where Ricardo spent a month as a resident, and out over the internet, where he has amplified this presence and possible interactions on Google Maps and Instagram, scattering clues and creating routes of access in the form of invitations. From geometries to gypsy drift, through tarot cards in a town square, a performance at the foot of a public monument, and a lot of face-pulling, all frugal and exuberant, onwards it goes, but lest we forget: exuberance is just an abravanist pretext.

Obras

Wava, 2017
técnica mista
PARTICIPAÇÃO André Bragança, Gabriel Junqueira e Marcelo Fagge

WAVA is an invisible wave that can emanate from the three elements (portals) arranged here in a triangle.

In this space, any individual can trigger the wave. The sequence of interaction with the elements and the rhythm of the experience should be decided by each participant. We recommend that participants enter barefoot.

Suggested interactions:

Canto platina (Platinum song)_RECEIVE
Lie down and stay in that position until you can tune into the platinum wavelength. Here the key is one of rest, meditation, attention to one’s breathing, the internalization of energy—attuning.

Naco de escada (Stair lip)_SHOUT
Ratchet up the volume, concentrate on something you want to break with and holler as loud as you can. Here the key is one of radicalization as a way of jolting energy into flux; of the possibility of bringing buried inner questions into the outer realm—liberation.

Mesa de centro (Coffee table)_DIALOGUE
Talk to a crystal ball in your mind’s eye, without touching it. See your future, visualize. Here the key is one of understanding, reformulation and the possibility of redirecting your ideas—redesign.

Wanda Pimentel

/in ,

Rio de Janeiro, 1973

For a long time, the Brazilian art critics that analyzed Wanda Pimentel’s work placed her outside the experimentalism and political contestations that characterized much of the country’s conceptual output during the 1960s and 70s. Highlighting her specificities, these readings tended to associate her with either Brazilian constructivism or North-American new figuration and pop art. More recently, however, the lyrical silence, mystery, stillness and ambivalent figuration that are so strong in Pimentel’s art have seen her reconsidered and repositioned within the context of Brazilian political art and the feminist debate.

The pieces on-show at Frestas are paintings and reliefs in wood produced during the 60s and 70s, many of them from the series Envolvimento [Involvement]. For the critic Fernando Cocchiarale, this series signaled not only the beginning and direction for Pimental’s career, but also her political identity. The selection on exhibition evinces both a private repertoire and ongoing dialogues with local and foreign artistic movements. These interfaces endow Pimentel’s work with certain attributes, such as a planar spatial arrangement; a graphic feel and saturated tones; a figurative ambiguity of interiors, bodies and objects; and a representation that tensions the naturalized connection between everyday domesticity and the feminine universe.

[F.B.]

Obras

Envolvimento, 1973
acrílica sobre tela
Coleção João Sattamini, comodato no
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói

Sem título, 1968
vinílica sobre tela
Coleção João Sattamini, comodato no
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói

Sem título, sem data
vinílica sobre eucatex
Coleção João Sattamini, comodato no
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói

Sem título, 1969
vinílica sobre duratex
Coleção João Sattamini, comodato no
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói

Sem título, 1978
acrílica sobre madeira
Coleção João Sattamini, comodato no
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói

Sem título, 1969
vinílica sobre tela
Coleção João Sattamini, comodato no
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói

Sem título, 1970
vinílica sobre madera
Coleção João Sattamini, comodato no
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói

Sem título, da série Bueiros, 1970
vinil sobre madera
Coleção João Sattamini, comodato no
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói

Sem título, 2013
Coleção João Sattamini, comodato no
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói

Teresa Margolles

/in ,

Cualicán, 1963. Lives in Mexico City

Investigating the violence that plagues Mexico, largely the result of narcoterrorism, is a recurrent practice in the work of Teresa Margolles. Far from the traditional association between death and joy in Mexico’s visual culture, the artist gathers documents that stoke the public debate on a problem so persistent it has become practically systemic. The artist worked as a coroner with the Forensic Medicine Department from 1993 to 1998, and the experience supplied her with an insider’s view of morgues, the stages in human decomposition and the red tape that surrounds murder victims. Over the years, Margolles has raised related issues in performances, videos, installations and sculptures in which the viewer experiences—often through direct contact—a disturbing association between aesthetics and violence.

In Vaporización [Vaporization] (2001), the artist humidified the exhibition space with the water used to wash cadavers. This same water was transformed into air bubbles that filled a gallery in the 2003 work En el aire [In the Air]. At the Venice Biennale in 2009, Margolles presented, among other works, the installation Bandera [Flag], which consisted of fabric steeped in blood collected from the streets and then raised on a pole beside the Mexican flag.

At Frestas, she presents the series Ajuste de cuentas [Settling the Score] (2007), which relates the theme of violent death to material luxury. For this work, Margolles made necklaces, rings, bracelets and charms out of 18-karat gold, but instead of diamonds or other gems, she inserted shards of glass extracted from the bodies of people killed in gun battles between the armed forces and narcoterrorists in the streets of Culiacán. Put on display in showcases like those found at jewelry stores, the pieces are a discreet, seductive invitation to admire horror.

[F.J.]

Obras

Ajuste de cuentas [Ajuste de contas], 2007
vidro e ouro

Ajuste de cuentas 2 [Ajuste de contas 2], 2007
vidro e ouro

Ajuste de cuentas 9 [Ajuste de contas 9], 2007
vidro e ouro

Ajuste de cuentas 15 [Ajuste de contas 15], 2007
vidro e ouro

Ajuste de cuentas 17 [Ajuste de contas 17], 2007
vidro e ouro

Sergio Zevallos

/in ,

Lima, 1962. Lives in Berlin

Sergio Zevallos’ production is associated with the radical experience of Grupo Chaclacayo (1982-1994), of which he was a member alongside Helmut Psotta and Raúl Avellaneda. The group’s actions were created within the context of State-sponsored terrorism and the armed conflict with paramilitary organizations in Peru. Chaclacayo is a contemporary of Movimiento Subterráneo, a countercultural, anarchist phenomenon in which musicians, poets and architects came together to conduct radical actions on the fringes of the official art scene in 1980s Lima. In Chaclacayo’s statements, the body—theatrically cross-dressed and performed in a manner that blends pornography and Catholic liturgy—operated as a powerful criticism against the physical and symbolic violence that colonialism, religion and militarism impose upon the subject. This uncolonized, tortured, mutilated, burned or “disappeared” body was exhibited, naturalized and turned into spectacle on a daily basis in the media. According to Paul Preciado, Grupo Chaclacayo “operated one of the sharpest reflections on the functioning of necropolitics in post-colonial societies, their relations with mythic-religious instruments of semiotization and its sensorial and sexual metabolization through the social body”.

At Frestas, Zevallos presents Cuaderno de matemática [Math Notebook] (2014) and the pieces Callejón oscuro [Dark Alley] (2013) and HKG (2014), part of the series Matemática [Mathematics] (2013-2014). In this set of works, the artist builds narratives in which figurative representations of the human being form direct relations with instruments for the control, pathologization and extermination of bodies that are neither white nor heteronormative. The elements of these standardizing discourses are appropriated from texts, data and graphs taken from books on anatomy, physiology and hygiene, forensic medicine and Peru’s penal and civil codes.

[F.J.]

Obras

Callejón oscuro [Beco escuro], 2013
grafite e decalque sobre papel
CORTESIA do artista e da galeria 80m2
Livia Benavides

HKG, 2014
grafite e decalque sobre papel
CORTESIA do artista e da galeria 80m2
Livia Benavides

Cuaderno de matemática
[Caderno de matemática], 2014
grafite e decalque sobre papel
CORTESIA do artista e da galeria 80m2
Livia Benavides

Dias & Riedweg

/in ,

Rio de Janeiro, 1964 and Lucerne, 1955. Live in Rio de Janeiro

Maurício Dias and Walter Riedweg’s installations are largely produced in dialogue with minorities shunted to the fringes of society. Since 2004, the duo has been developing projects that explore the representation of alterity in history, resulting in such works as Amparo [Support] (2013), Funk Staden (2007) and Throw (2004).

At Frestas, Dias & Riedweg present Realize suas fantasias [Fulfill Your Fantasies], a work that references the ad “Fulfill your sexual fantasies. Photo + telephone”, which Charles Hovland ran for over twenty years in New York newspapers. Through this ad, the photographer offered to take black and white fantasy photos registering all the secret desires of his clients—men, women and transexuals. In parallel, Hovland started doing color photos of male nudes for magazines. In over two decades, he amassed an archive of 3,000 black-and-white negatives, 450 thousand slides and 300 polaroids.

The artists have known Charles Hovland since the early 90s, and, in this installation commissioned by Frestas, they explore the potentialities and particularities of the visual narratives contained in the photographer’s archive, especially in relation to his subjective, pulsating record of sexuality and the urban imaginary in New York during the 70s and 80s. The result is a non-hierarchical narrative of Hovland’s archives, including pictures from his collections and his studio, scenes from the city’s underground life and portraits of the photographer himself, as well as his recent interviews with the duo.

[F.J.]

Obra

Waiting for my Model [Esperando meu modelo], 2017
videoinstalação

A partir do acervo de Charles Hovland
Fotografia: Paul Carpenter, Dias & Riedweg e Charles Hovland
Scans de fotografia analógica e tratamento de imagem: Anna Luiza Braga
Captação de audio: Paul Carpenter
Assistência: Juliana Franklin e Anna Luiza Braga
Transcrição: Anna Luiza Braga
Agradecimentos: Charles Hovland, Marcello Dantas, Margery Pearlmuter, Carl Friedrich, Anna Luiza Braga, Juliana Franklin, Karen Haley, Eduardo Brandão, Daniela Labra, Angela Madalegna, Paula Marujo, Madai Produções, Galeria Vermelho, Sesc São Paulo

Guerrilla Girls

/in , ,

1985, live in the United States

In 1985, in dialogue with the feminist and civil rights movements in the US, a group of women artists and activists started promoting actions designed to expose the art world’s sexism and racism. The women adopted gorilla masks and pseudonyms like Frida Kahlo and Kathe Kollwitz as a strategy to denounce the erasure of women from history and contemporary art. Using basic statistics as a weapon, the Guerrilla Girls obtained precise information about the skewed gender balance at exhibitions and in museum collections. With this data, and using circulation strategies that combined the discursiveness of the modern vanguards and conceptual art with the didacticism of political militancy, the collective produces humorous and persuasive posters they paste all over town.

One of their most emblematic posters, from 1984, featured a female nude with a gorilla head on a yellow background. Next to the figure we read the provocative caption “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?”, followed by some facts and figures: “Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female”.

After decades operating outside the art circuit and market, the Guerrilla Girls started exhibiting at major institutions, which included their posters in their collections. This move by no means weakened the group’s critical discourse. Quite the contrary, it broadened its reach and plugged it into networks, with some compelling results, such as Complaints Department (2016-). Initially created for the Tate Modern in London, a new version has been prepared for the second edition of Frestas, with a website (departamentodereclamacoes.com) and desk at the Sesc Sorocaba Recreational Center, where visitors can register their gripes, pet hates and criticisms on pretty much any topic they wish. This openness makes the “department” a soapbox for multiple voices and a gauge for the collective and institutional limits of listening.

[F.J.]

Obras

The Guerrilla Girls Complaints Department
[Departamento de reclamações das Guerrilla Girs], 2017
instalação
AGRADECIMENTO Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP)

Do Women Have to be Naked to Get Into the Met. Museum?
[As mulheres precisam estar nuas para entrar no Met. Museum?],
1989-2017
banner
Free The Women Artists [Libertem as mulheres artistas], 2006-2017
banner
Disturbing the Peace [Perturbando a paz], 2009-2017
banner
Dear Billionaire Collector [Querido colecionador bilionário], 2015
banner

Diango Hernández

/in ,

Sancti Spíritus, 1970. Lives in Düsseldorf

Diango Hernández’s artistic practices bear a direct relation to Caribbean tropical culture and the Cuban sociocultural and geopolitical context. The trade embargoes and economic crises, the Cuban/US conflict, the socialist ideology, and pre- and post-revolution Cuba are all recurrent themes in his sculptural and pictorial constructions. With strong discursive capacity and synthetic power, Hernández’s works articulate fictional realities and poetic actions. In Leg Me, Chair Me, Love me, on-show at the Triennial, a three-legged chair teeters precariously while the missing fourth leg travels around in a circle, reconnecting with the chair intermittently, as its orbit allows. When the chair becomes briefly whole, a light turns on overhead, only to switch off again as the leg continues on its way.

A designer and architect, Hernández spent ten years with Ordo Amoris Cabinet, a collective of Cuban artists and designers who create objects that fully embrace economic, material and technological instability as core attributes, in a way similar to the jerry-built aesthetic known as gambiarra in Brazil. The result was a hybrid created out of all manner of raw materials provisionally endowed with the form and function of a “designer” object.

[F.J.]

Obra

Leg me, Chair me, Love me [Me perna, me cadeira, me ama], 2010
cadeira, luz, madeira e motor
Coleção Moraes Barbosa, São Paulo

Daniel Escobar

/in , ,

Santo Ângelo, 1982. Lives in Porto Alegre

Through an archeology of the present and varied appropriation strategies, Daniel Escobar transmutes ephemeral images of consumption and desire, especially those generated by real estate and tourist advertising, into raw material for art. In Especulação imobiliária [Real estate Speculation] (2014), the artist fills acrylic showcases with Kiddies building blocks wrapped in real estate fliers and ads. In Anuncie aqui [Advertise Here] (2014), Escobar set up an empty billboard at the exhibition venue and offered it for rent as advertising space.

The artist is also interested in the advertising strategies adopted by the art world and its exhibition mechanisms. The installations Conjugado [Conjugated] and Coleção particular [Private Collection], both from 2016, are cases in point. In the first, the artist fills the exhibition space with a domestic environment planned by an interior designer, who was free to choose the room type, furniture, and lighting, as well as an artwork by Escobar to complete the decor. In the second installation, Escobar appropriated pages from decoration magazines that had works of art among the items of decor. The intervention consisted in framing the pages, using acrylic passe-partout to cover up everything else in the images besides the artworks.

Throughout the Triennial, Escobar will present a new version of the series A arte da conversação [The Art of Conversation] (2012), for which he was authorized by the owners of five local commercial establishments to remove a letter apiece from their signage. The borrowed letters were then used to write up the word “sonho” [dream] on the Sesc Sorocaba façade. United in the formation of a new meaning, each letter retains the typographic characteristics and materials of the sign it was lifted from, which has to get along without it in the meantime. The empty space may detract from the effect, but it won’t render the signs illegible. The more attentive passer-by may realize what Escobar is up to: grafting the promise of advertising onto an art institution.

[F.J.]

Obras

A arte da conversação, 2012/2017
tipografia em metal dos estabelecimentos ESAMC Sorocaba, Chamonix
Plaza Hotel, Pet Shop Canino’s, Mecalight, Sex Shop Paradise
FOTOGRAFIAS André Pinto

Daniel Caballero

/in ,

São Paulo, 1972

The city plays a central role in Daniel Caballero’s investigations. To reflect on the individual and collective uses and occupations of the urban space, the artist collects materials from vacant lots and park or woodland, establishes partnerships, and proposes ephemeral interventions and environmental actions. At Frestas, he presents the installation Viagem pitoresca através do espaço ao redor da minha casa [Picturesque Trip through the Space Outside my House], underway since 2012. The project is a mix of materials gathered and interventions and environmental actions conducted—often in collaboration with artists, collectives and volunteers—in wastelands, squares and parks throughout Greater São Paulo. One of the aims is to recover the history and original species of an endangered biome, the Cerrado (tropical savanna), which predominates in the Brazilian Midwest, but with some remaining pockets in metropolitan São Paulo.

This environmental problem features in Caballero’s installation in the form of structures made out of building materials and scrap, naturalist drawings of the native flora, videos, books and travelogues, plants and transplanted vegetation. The artist weaves a narrative about a resilient nature and, in parallel, collates for a reflection on art documentation as a way of sampling events of everyday life, beyond the artwork and its museum spaces. In so doing, he underscores the inadequacy of thinking about art as something autonomous or confined to material objects. More than simply mapping endangered greenery, Viagem pitoresca… articulates a set of events, interventions and transformations. These gestures demonstrate the potential of art as a social and political act capable of triggering the futures—or at least the utopias—incubating in things and the world.

[F. J.]

Obras

Viagem pitoresca através do espaço ao redor da minha casa 03, 2017
madeira, desenhos, plantas, vídeo