18th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil: Southern Panoramas + 30 Years
November 6, 2013–February 2, 2014
Southern Panoramas points out new ways to think and experience contemporary art production and its potencies
Featuring artwork submitted during a 2012 open call, the Southern Panoramas show gives visibility to an expressive cross-section of recent art from the geopolitical South of the world (Latin America, Caribbean, Africa, Middle East, Eastern Europe, South and Southeast Asia, and Oceania), which in turn calls upon us to detect a set of aesthetical, political, social, and subjective issues that characterize both contemporaneity, in a broader sense, and the specific tensions typical of each territory.
In that sense, the show proposes a re-articulation of the curating construct: far from setting out to prove a theoretical line of thought or building a closed-off curatorial discourse, it operates through tensioning to build a show sensibly, all the while considering the social, political and economic differences that characterize the complexity of contemporary geopolitics and art production from the geopolitical South.
The board of curators reviewed over 2,000 projects and shortlisted nearly 100 artists to take part in the competitive show. The shortlist spans 32 different countries (nine in Latin America, seven in Africa, five in the Middle East, five in Southeast Asia, four in Eastern Europe, and two in Oceania). The artwork includes installations, performances, drawings, sculptures, paintings, artist books, and videos.
In Southern Panoramas, affinities and attritions hint at a wide variety of issues, such as new approaches to the nature-society clash; architecture and other spatialization experiences as regimes of representation; the geographic mobility that reinterprets territories and identities; narrative disruptions which reveal the ambiguities of human relations; memory in times of digital transit (and transitoriness); and image at two different moments—the image that questions its own mediation as it rethinks capturing mechanisms, and the radically media-based image of mass culture.
By the end of the show’s first week, prizes will be granted to works selected by the jury, composed of the curators Abdellah Karroum (Morocco), Cristiana Tejo (Brazil), Koyo Kouoh (Cameroon), Rifky Effendy (Indonesia), and Yolanda Wood Pujols (Cuba). Apart from the grand prize in cash, nine other prizes will consist of artist-in-residence grants at partner institutions around the world (including Brazil, China, USA, Lebanon, Mexico, Poland, and Senegal).
Each of the winners will also receive a trophy, traditionally designed as an art piece in itself. The São Paulo-based artist Erika Verzutti has been invited to design this year’s trophy. Tunga, Carmela Gross, Raquel Garbelotti, Luiz Zerbini, and Rosângela Rennó are some of the artists who have designed trophies for past Festival editions.
Stay up-to-date
We will release further details about the Festival soon, including the 30 Years show, the TV series, the Public Programs, and publications celebrating our 30th anniversary. Register on our website to keep informed.
18th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil
30 Years + Southern Panoramas
Curator-general: Solange Farkas. Curator: Eduardo de Jesus, Fernando Oliva, Julia Rebouças. Programme director: Thereza Farkas. Public programs curator: Sabrina Moura
November 6, 2013 to February 2, 2014
Sesc Pompeia + CineSesc
São Paulo, Brazil
www.videobrasil.org.br
Undertaking: Associação Cultural Videobrasil & Sesc SP
