Rosana Paulino: The Liability of Threads / An Overture of Grief and Joy

Kunstverein Braunschweig is pleased to announce its winter program.

Rosana Paulino: The Liabiltiy of Threads
December 3, 2022–February 19, 2023

The Liability of Threads at Kunstverein Braunschweig presents the work of Rosana Paulino in the artist’s first comprehensive institutional solo exhibition in Europe. It includes several groups of works from the past 20 years occupying the entire ground floor of the Villa Salve Hospes, as well as a number of new works created for the exhibition.

Rosana Paulino’s work and research focuses on social, ethnic and gender issues, particularly the black female body and its representation. A variety of artistic techniques—sewing, collage, drawing, video, installation—are used to challenge the colonial view of history. Such a view is still used today to legitimate existing racial and power structures in Brazil and beyond. This European historiography formed the basis for racist scientific and biological knowledge about the peoples and nature in the tropics, influenced religious narratives and continues to serve as a justification for the suppression of African identity in the world.

Using both personal and archival images, her own photographs and experiences, Paulino creates a counter-narrative that is at once fragile and radical to the common images of artistic and scientific iconography since the 17th century and that seeks to justify the narrative of an inferior race to this day. Paulino explores the effects of memory and the intertwining of aesthetic, social and psychological worlds, relocating historical images that have contributed to a distorted construction of memory. The artist’s sensitive, powerful and complex work entwines a kind of autobiographical biology between science and mythology: through descriptions of bodies, transformations and metamorphoses, captivity and protection of the female body.

Rosana Paulino was born in São Paulo in 1967 and holds a PhD in Fine Arts from the School of Communications and Arts of the University of São Paulo (ECA/USP), a specialisation in Printmaking from the London Print Studio, London, and a BA in Printmaking from ECA/USP. Her works have been shown in numerous exhibitions including: 59. Venice Biennale (2022), Afro-Atlantic Histories, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (2021), 22nd Sydney Biennial, Sydney (2020); 21st Sesc Videobrasil Biennial, Sesc 24 de Maio, São Paulo (2019); Tropical Paradise, The Frank Museum of Art, Otterbein University, Ohio (2019); Rosana Paulino—A costura da memória, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil (2018); Settlement, Clifford Art Gallery, Colgate University, New York (2018).

Curator: Nuno de Brito Rocha

An Overture of Grief and Joy
December 3, 2022–February 19, 2023

With An Overture of Grief and Joy, the Kunstverein Braunschweig invites the public to a discursive program to examine and reflect on the unresolved crises and conflicts that characterize our present through the lenses of art. An Overture of Grief and Joy explores states of exhaustion, search for belonging, resistance, perplexity, as well as grief and joy, and intertwines various temporal references. In this way, historical continuities of martial and racist violence, exploitation and marginalization, and survival in discriminatory structures are collectively addressed.

The experimental format, consisting of film screenings and artistic interventions, is divided into three phases, each accompanied by a conversation.

With contributions by: Ute Adamczewski, Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo, Nina Emge, Dana Kavelina, Ligia Lewis and Marcela Moraga

Curators: Nuno de Brito Rocha, Benedikt Johannes Seerieder

Events
Coversation with Ute Adamczewski​
December 15, 6–7pm

Curators’ tour on The Liability of Threads
January 5, 6–7pm,  with Nuno de Brito Rocha, Interim Director

Conversation with Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo​
January 11, 6–7pm

Curators’ talk
January 26, 6–7pm, on An Overture of Grief and Joy with Benedikt Johannes Seerieder

Curators’ tour on The Liability of Threads
February 9, 6–7pm, with Nuno de Brito Rocha, Interim Director

Conversation with Marcela Moraga
February 16, 6–7pm

The exhibitions have been made possible by: