Susan Hiller

/in ,

Tallahassee, 1940. Live in Londres

The artist dialogues with the historical legacy of minimalism and conceptual art in formalizing her works, which are produced in a variety of mediums, such as installation, video and photography. Susan Hiller frequently avails of such strategies as inventory, translation and archeology in dealing with culture and invisibility.

At Frestas, she will be presenting the series The Last Silent Movie (2007-2008), which consists of a film and 24 etchings on paper. On a dark screen, voiceovers speak dead languages about to disappear once and for all from this earth, while the engravings visually translate the sound waves of those dialects into oscilloscopes.

While we hear some of the last surviving speakers of these endangered languages, English subtitles translate their content, giving us the chance to decipher aspects of these cultural communities through oral discourse about their everyday lives.

The work raises a number of questions: how much memory and history will be lost with those tongues? What is the socioeconomic context that determines which cultures prevail and which go extinct? Instead of a rigorous inventory, it’s a sensitive relationship we forge with these languages, mediated by the physical sensation of hearing them spoken in a darkened room.

[L.B.]

Obras

The Last Silent Movie [O último filme mudo], 2007-2008
projeção em Blu-Ray, 21” e gravuras sobre Moulin de Gué (Rives de Lin) 270 gr.
Coleção Inhotim

Thiago Honório

/in ,

Carmo do Paranaíba, 1979. Vive e trabalha em São Paulo

Alvo [Target], Revolver and Bala [Bullet/Sweet] are previously unseen works that, shown as a triptych, form a relationship of discursive reciprocity. In Bala, a life-size human doll welcomes the visitors, offering itself up for consumption: like those popular at children’s birthday parties in Brazil during the 70s, the doll’s skeleton consists of trays of coconut sweets. In Portuguese, bala can mean either “sweet” or “bullet”, the former warm and fuzzy, the latter cold and deadly. The theme of violence runs through its relationship with the other two parts of the triptych. The installation Revolver consists of the empty casings of eight revolvers up to three hundred years old. Soldered to an iron pipe, one facing the other, the guns create their own battlefield, tantalizingly offered at hand height to the public. Honório frequently uses objects with a historical charge to them, but which he imbues with present narratives, creating works that speak of the intersections of time, memory and violence. Here, the word “revolver” also has the dual meaning of pistol and something that revolves or churns.

The works presented at Frestas form a sort of self-portrait of the artist, while also reflecting upon the situation of crisis and flight in which the contemporary subject now finds itself in general terms. The final part of the triptych, Alvo, delivers a tragicomic comment on the angst and violence contained in these works: a clown’s nose is stretched out into the form of a tense smile.

[L.B.]

Obras

Revolver, 2014/2017
8 carcaças de revólveres dos séculos XIX, XX e XXI soldadas a um tubo de aço

Bala, 2015/2017
boneco-baleiro natural 1:1; balas de coco embrulhadas em papel rococó

Alvo, 2004/2017
régua de acrílico de 30 cm, haste de acrílico, nariz de palhaço profissional, elástico

On Kawara

/in ,

Kariya, 1933 – Nova York, 2014

Living in the United States, where he started producing work in tune with the conceptual art debate in the 60s, On Kawara focuses on a self-referential and experiential understanding of language and time. One of his best-known series is Today, begun in 1966. The series consists of paintings that do nothing but state the day, month and year of their making. Instead of channeling energy into composition, color and theme, the series obeys a few set rules: the date is always centralized and painted in white, in the same font, on a matte canvas.

Unlike other North-American conceptual artists, Kawara used painting as his main medium. In this series, for example, painting is the instrument he uses to keep time and state his own existence in the world, converted here into a simple time marker.

On display at Frestas, One Million Years is a reflection on time. Begun in the 1960s and still open to new experiences, even after Kawara’s death in 2014, the work consists of two books: the first, Past, is a record dedicated to “all those who lived and died”, and contains a list of all years from 998,031 BC to 1969; the second volume, Future, lists all years from 1993 to 1,001,992, and is dedicated to “the last one”. The instruction is for the books to be read in English by a man and a woman, who should utter past and future dates alternately. With this work, Kawara shows how random the chronological organization of life can be, as well as the absurdity of grappling with swathes of time as long as a million years.

[L.B.]

Obras

One Million Years (Past and Future)
[Um milhão de anos – passado e futuro], 2009
discos, 60’
Coleção Moraes-Barbosa

One Million Years [Um milhão de anos], 1999
2 livros, caixa com 2 livros
Coleção Moraes-Barbosa

Marcius Galan

/in ,

Indianapolis, 1972. Vive em São Paulo

Marcius Galan’s installation takes as its theme the venue at which most of the Triennial’s exhibitions will be held: the Sesc Sorocaba car park. Interested in architecture and its context, Galan asked for his designated space to be as little altered as possible by the exhibition design, considering its original characteristics to be the main determiner for his concept and choice of materials.

The artist uses design and geometry to reflect upon the bureaucratic shaping of spaces and to suggest ways of subverting their tailored uses. Galan seeks concision in his use of materials, whose original functions help determine the form and content of his art. Here, subject and execution are perfectly attuned. So precise is he that the result of his artistic thought very often identifies flaws in apparently perfect mechanisms. In order to see what lies behind the veneer of order, Galan’s work demands an engaged viewer willing to look from other angles, distrusting what is immediately recognized as functional and humdrum.

[L. B.]

Obras

Rupestre, 2017
pintura automotiva, objetos encontrados, telefone com som
PARTICIPAÇÃO Carlos Issa

Francesca Woodman

/in ,

Denver, 1958 – Nova York, 1981

The model for most of her own photographs, Francesca Woodman worked mainly with self-portraits. In her pictures, set inside rundown houses, young women present themselves in ambivalent situations that suggest both strength and fragility. Sometimes her figures were photographed in movement, creating long-exposure shots of gossamery shapes seen in either dilapidated surroundings hostile to their presence or in the more welcoming bosom of nature.

Woodman’s suicide at the age of 22, after a long battle with depression, suggests a layer of meaning that is hard to overlook in any critical appraisal of her work. She left behind a considerable corpus of 800 photographs, most of it produced during her student years. Today, her parents are custodians of her collection, which carries all the drama and sarcasm of a challenging artist who was master of her own propositions. Though very young, she succeeded in forging an experimental style of her own that cites surrealism and the faked ghost pictures of the 19th century. Woodman’s art also touched upon performance and issues of gender and identity, weighty themes on the US art scene in the 70s.

[L.B.]

Obras

Sem título, da série Eel (Veneza,
Itália), 1978
impressão de prata coloidal
Coleção Andrea e José Olympio Pereira

Sem título, 1979
impressão de prata coloidal
Cortesia Luciana Brito

From Polka Dots [De bolinhas
(Providence, Rhode Island)], 1976
impressão de prata coloidal
Coleção Particular

Sem título (Roma, Itália), 1977-1978
impressão de prata coloidal
Coleção Particular

Sem título (Andover, Massachusetts),
1972-1974
impressão de prata coloidal
Coleção Particular

Sem título (Boulder, Colorado),
1972-1975
impressão de prata coloidal
Cortesia Mendes Wood DM São Paulo

Sem título (Providence, Rhode
Island), 1976
impressão de prata coloidal
Cortesia Mendes Wood DM São Paulo

Sem título (New York), 1979
impressão de prata coloidal
Cortesia Mendes Wood DM São Paulo

Sem título (New York), 1979-1980
impressão de prata coloidal
Coleção Dulce e João Carlos de
Figueiredo Ferraz

Daniel Senise

/in ,

Rio de Janeiro, 1955

At the start of his career, in the 1980s, Daniel Senise took part in exhibitions that legitimized his work within the context of the so-called “80s Generation”, a diverse group of artists that was recognized by the critics for its gestural, vibrantly colored approach to painting.

Since the late 90s, Senise has been producing works that dwell somewhere between painting and collage, as the artist appropriates materials from his everyday working environment, such as dirt and nails from the studio floor, and pages from books and art catalogues. As such, the behind-the-scenes debris of artistic production becomes the core subject of the art itself. Texture and chromatic variations are generated using a technique that is not unlike monotype, in which pigments and shapes are transferred from one plane to another through contact.

The works created for Frestas draw from photographs of the Sorocaba Railway Station, a building inaugurated in 1930. The railway itself was one of the most important lines during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The station house, once a thriving link between Sorocaba and the city of São Paulo, is currently defunct.

[L.B.]

Obras

Sorocabana V, 2017
Objetos (4 peças de madeira) colados
em fotografia adesivada em fotografia
AGRADECIMENTO Instituto Federal de
Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia de
São Paulo (IFSP)

Sorocabana III, 2017
Objetos (azulejos) colados em fotografia
adesivada em alumínio
AGRADECIMENTO Instituto Federal de
Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia de
São Paulo (IFSP)

Sorocabana II, 2017
Objetos (azulejos) colados em fotografia
adesivada em alumínio
AGRADECIMENTO Instituto Federal de
Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia de
São Paulo (IFSP)

Sorocabana IV, 2017
Objeto (madeira) colado em fotografia
adesivada em alumínio
AGRADECIMENTO Instituto Federal de
Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia de
São Paulo (IFSP)

Sorocabana I, 2017
Objetos metálicos rebitados em fotografia
adesivada em alumínio
AGRADECIMENTO Instituto Federal de
Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia de
São Paulo (IFSP)

Daniel Lie

/in ,

São Paulo, 1988

Lie presents a previously unseen installation, Passa logo [Hurry Across], in the courtyard between the two blocks of the Sesc Sorocaba building. Live flowers and plants adorning the skyway will be left to wither and rot over the course of the exhibition, with the words “Passa logo” written vertically in large letters and clearly visible from the street.

The work underscores the functional nature of the skyway and invites visitors to consider for a moment their fleeting, superficial contact with this sort of space. At the same time it celebrates the passage, the work also issues a humorous order to the visitor: obey the time flow the architecture dictates and don’t dally on the skyway.

The work derives from Lie’s research on time and impermanence. The artist likes to work with organic material (plants, fruit, earth) in order to build structures that undergo the various stages of decomposition, engaging in a slow, public ceremony that has one inevitable end. The work produced for Frestas looks at the harried pace of contemporary life in contrast with the slower time of nature. In the meantime, Lie’s gesture lauds rights of passage, from one building to another, from one stage to the next, from life to death.

[L.B.]

Obras

Passa logo, 2017
técnica mista
TÉCNICAS VERTICAIS Arte Técnica Solução em Instalações de Arte
TÉCNICO RESPONSÁVEL Haroldo Alves

Pedro França

/in ,

Rio de Janeiro, 1984. Lives in São Paulo

Tearing, crumpling, blotting, gluing, breaking and staining, Pedro França has investigated ways to evoke a place of murmur and indetermination, besides acknowledging as positive processes of dismantling and destruction. Interested in working on a scale that can furnish immersive experiences, his recent work establishes direct dialogue with Cia. Teatral Ueinzz (The Ueinzz Theater Company), of which he is also a member. The result is an artistic output that shuttles between props on-stage and artworks on display.

In the installations Ueinzz Mix #1 (Cais de ovelhas) [Ueinzz Mix # 1 (Sheep Quay)] (2015) and Especulante paraíso [Speculating Paradise] (2016), França combines structures, objects and fragments of sundry materials in jumbled assemblages that seem to multiply and proliferate like a fungus, spreading in a shapeless sprawl, without clear contours or hierarchy among the parts. Clothing, fabrics, wood, paper, plastic, aluminum and cement are sanded down, glued together, printed, drawn, scrawled and written on, stained and collaged to become raw material for artworks.

At the Triennial, the artist presents Archichroma (2017), which consists of a video and a large and heterogeneous array of objects, all painted in the same glossy green, arranged in Sesc’s amphitheater. Filmed during the preparations of the event, these elements serve as supports for other images, in chroma key. While this technique is traditionally used to post-produce backdrops in audiovisual productions, in Archichroma it’s the foreground figures that become the screens for projections, thus disappearing in plain sight through camouflage, or standing out as something they are not.

[Y.R.]

Obras

Archichroma, 2016
vídeo e objetos
AGRADECIMENTOS Yuli Yamagata

O Nome do Boi

/in , ,

A network of artists from all over Brazil, O Nome do Boi was formed in 2016 in response to the political crisis in the country. The group’s resistance is predicated upon a range of artistic and political strategies designed to bear public witness to this historical moment through counter-narratives that—produced by multiple authors—denounce the figures and motivations behind the projects of power now vying for control. The group takes its name from a popular Brazilian expression “Dar nome aos bois” [Name the bulls], which means to identify the real culprits involved in a situation.

For the Triennial, O Nome do Boi worked in a range of spaces and with a number of agents in Sorocaba, promoting gatherings, debates, workshops and joint actions at the Sesc unit and at other venues throughout the town. Among the activities proposed are graphic workshops at the event’s Educational Space, a temporary radio station, and a series of street demonstrations accompanied by a sound bike and material produced in a collective atelier.

[Y. R.]