Opening week of 19th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil | Southern Panoramas
October 6–10, 2015
Sesc Pompeia, Galpão VB and Paço das Artes
São Paulo, Brazil
From October 6 to 10, 2015, São Paulo will be the place to be when it comes to art productions from the geopolitical South. Over 100 artists, curators, researchers and delegates from organizations focusing on this conceptual territory will convene in the city for the opening week of the 19th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil | Southern Panoramas, featuring work by 62 artists from 27 countries and an event-packed program at Sesc Pompeia, Galpão VB and Paço das Artes.
The festival will feature four exhibitions, film programs, performances, public programs activities, mediation actions, publication launches and an award ceremony, cementing its position as a leading platform for contemporary art from the South, the subject of all of this edition’s curatorial sections and program. “The geopolitics-based grouping of areas with colonial pasts is an idea that has driven the festival since the 1990s. This edition is entirely devoted to cross-referencing different subsets of recent productions from this symbolical region,” says the chief curator Solange Farkas, who worked with guest curators Bernardo José de Souza, Bitu Cassundé, João Laia and Júlia Rebouças this year.
October 6at 8pm will see the festival’s official opening at Sesc Pompeia, the main venue in past editions, with the exhibitions Southern Panoramas | Guest Artists, featuring pieces by Aboulaye Konaté (Mali), Gabriel Abrantes (Portugal), Yto Barrada (France/Morocco), Rodrigo Matheus and Sônia Gomes (both from Brazil); and with Southern Panoramas | Selected Works, showcasing videos, installations, performances, photographs, sound pieces and sculptures by 42 artists selected through the Festival’s call for entries. Opening on October 7, at 6pm, also at Sesc Pompeia, are the festival’s film programs, comprising 11 pieces selected via the same call for entries, plus five films by the guest artist Gabriel Abrantes.
On October 8 at 7pm, the Southern Panoramas | Commissioned Projects exhibit will inaugurate Galpão VB, the new headquarters of Associação Cultural Videobrasil, and its commissioning of projects selected through open calls. This year, projects entered by Carlos Monroy (Colombia), Cristiano Lenhardt (Brazil), Keli-Safia Maksud (Kenya) and Ting-Ting Cheng (Taiwan) have been selected.
On October 9, at 7pm the parallel exhibit Those Born For Adventure Don’t Stray From the Path – Artworks from the Videobrasil Collection premieres at Paço das Artes. Curated by Diego Matos, Videobrasil’s archive and research coordinator, the exhibit looks for specificities and conflations between national and international productions in 15 pieces from the Videobrasil Collection, indirectly enhancing the issues raised by the 19th Festival.
The reflections elicited by the festival artworks and artists will branch out into activities that transcend the exhibitions, in a busy public programs schedule, which includes meetings and conversations, seminar, workshops and mediation actions. The opening week will feature a tour of the exhibition guided by the artist Rodrigo Matheus; a conversation with Tilting Axis, a discussion platform that presents proposals focusing on art exchange and encouragement in the Caribbean; and an informal meeting with people from partner organizations for this edition’s residency prizes. Two panels from the seminar “Places and Meanings in Art: Debates from the South” will take place during the same week: “Rethinking traditions: art, gesture and contemporaneity” and “Rethinking spaces: art, uses and daily life,” featuring artists, curators and award jury members. Finally, workshops hosted by Abdoulaye Konaté and Ting-Ting Cheng will respectively explore traditional art languages from Mali and the building of a conceptual and imagetic repertoire around the notion of the South.
Three publications will be launched during this period. Two of them relate to the festival: the Southern Panoramas | Guest Artists exhibition book and Southern Panoramas | Readings | Perspectives for other geographies of thought, a compilation of essays and art manifestos that introduce, champion, or challenge the notion of a geopolitical South. The book Videobrasil: three decades of video, encounters and transformations, which revisits the contents and changes that marked the history of the Festival since its inception in 1983, is also slated for release during this week.
Plan your visits: see the full program of the 19th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil | Southern Panoramas.
