17th Videobrasil: Record Audience
Held at three different venues in São Paulo, the 17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil has set a new record at 300,000 visitors and 90,000 participants in its educational programs. The Festival program included two shows: Southern Panoramas, with works by 101 artists from the global South, and Olafur Eliasson – Your body of work.
The 17th Festival also served as a platform for two successful endeavors: weekly program Videobrasil on SESCTV, which uses the contents the organization has compiled on television; and the Videobrasil Open Studio Prize, which commissioned artwork created by artists in residence at Casa Tomada, in São Paulo.
Olafur Eliasson – Your body of work, the artist’s first solo show in South America, was voted by the São Paulo Art Critics Association (APCA) the most important visual arts show of 2011.
Two other actions complement the show: the release of Olafur Eliasson – Your body of work book, Eliasson’s first in Brazil, still in 2011; and a film of the Videobrasil Authors Collection series in which filmmaker Karim Aïnouz rereads Eliasson’s oeuvre, scheduled for release in 2012.
Three of the artists who were awarded residency prizes in the Southern Panoramas show will start their residencies in the first half of 2012: in March, Carla Zaccagnini (Brazil) will be at pARTage (Mauritius); in May, Dirceu Maués (Brazil) leaves for a residency at the WBK Vrije Academie, in The Hague (the Netherlands), and Claudia Joskowicz (Bolivia) arrives in Itaparica (state of Bahia), for a two-and-a-half-month stint at the Sacatar Institute.
Starting in March 2012, a new project will expand the Festival audience: Southern Panoramas Travelling Exhibition 2012–2013, featuring works awarded and commissioned by Videobrasil, including installations, video installations, paintings, objects, and videos. The tour will start in the interior of the state of São Paulo and then continues in Brazilian capitals and foreign countries.
The Festival is an undertaking of Associação Cultural Videobrasil, in partnership with SESC. The institutions were also granted in 2011 their very first Jabuti, the Brazilian book industry’s most prestigious prize. It has been awarded to curators Solange Farkas and Antonio D’Avossa for Joseph Beuys – We Are the Revolution exhibition catalogue (2010).
