May 22, 2019–May 18, 2020
Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil announces the exhibition Vaivém (To-and-fro), an unprecedented curatorial project about the hammocks, art and visual culture in Brazil. The exhibition brings together around 350 artworks by more than 140 artists from different historical periods and media. After two successful presentations in the cultural center venues in São Paulo (May to July) and Brasília (September to November), the exhibition is now open in Rio de Janeiro (November 2019 to February 2020) and later in Belo Horizonte (March to May 2020).
Far from reinforcing the stereotypes of tropicality, the exhibition investigates the origins of the hammocks and its depictions: revisiting the past we can understand how an ancestral technology created by the Amerindian peoples was appropriated by Europeans. More than five centuries after the invasion of the Americas, the hammock has a prominent place not only in the constitution of the common sense of Brazilian culture, but also of Latin American identity.
Vaivém/To-and-fro occupies the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil galleries with paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, videos, documents, performance and visual culture objects, such as comic books and stamps. The works are dated from the 16th to the 21st centuries and shown in a transhistorical perspective. Instead of separating media and time periods, the exhibition design invites the public to blur borders between the hierarchy of the images and timeframes. Just like the movement of a hammock that goes from one side to the other, the body and the perception of the viewer are invited to move between different fields.
The exhibition is divided in six different sections: Resistences and permanences; Hammocks as sculptures, sculptures as hammocks; Looking at the other, looking at yourself; Disseminations: between public and private; Modernities: spaces for laziness; and Inventions of the Brazilian Northeast region. Each of these themes asks the public to look at the hammocks in complex narratives that rethink about the many histories of Brazil.
Having in mind the Amerindian origins of the hammocks, the exhibition brings more than 30 contemporary indigenous artists that mostly show works specially comissioned for the project. Coming from many regions of Brazil and different backgrounds, they work with all kinds of media—artists like, for example, Arissana Pataxó, Sallisa Rosa, Denilson Baniwa, Gustavo Caboco, Duhigó, Yermollay Coripouné, Carmézia Emiliano, Jaider Esbell, MAHKU and Dhiani Pa’saro. These and other artists are receiving an increasing attention not only in the art scene in Brazil but also in an international perspective. In a historical moment where many curatorial projects discuss the decolonization of the visual arts, this prominence is more than necessary.
The exhibition also includes many other Brazilian contemporary artists that during their careers used the hammocks with varied intentions. Young artists are shown in relation with very known and institutionalized names. As examples, we can refer to the works of Claudia Andujar, Bispo do Rosário, Tunga, Ernesto Neto, Lucio Costa, André Komatsu & Marcelo Cidade, Paulo Nazareth, Tarsila do Amaral, Candido Portinari, Dalton Paula, Hélio Oiticica, Aline Baiana and OPAVIVARÁ! As part of the important historical layer of the exhibition, European artists and travellers that went to Brazil from the 16th to the 19th century are present. Their images show how little by little the hammocks migrated from something seen as exotic to become part of a national identity in construction. Among them, there are names like Hans Staden, Jean-Baptiste Debret, Frans Post and Johann Moritz Rugendas.
Vaivém/To-and-fro comes with a fully illustrated catalogue with more than 300 pages. This book has documentation of the exhibition and images of all works shown. It also features texts by 15 authors that have practices from curating to cultural studies, from photography to psychonalysis. The hammocks and the images that refer to them are deeply analysed through contrasting gazes.
A digital version of the catalogue can be downloaded here.
Vaivém/To-and-fro is curated by Raphael Fonseca, assisted by Ludimilla Fonseca.
