From Body to Code
January 28–April 23, 2023
Analivia Cordeiro is a dancer, choreographer and architect, born 1954 in São Paulo, Brazil. Considered a pioneer in both video art and computer-based video dance, she has been developing since 1973 a continuous and intense transdisciplinary work exploring the relationships between body, movement, visual and audiovisual art as well as media art. With her innovative M3x3 computer-based video dance from 1973, Analivia stands as the forerunner of video art in Latin America, paving the way for the first generation to explore the medium experimentally. She is also one of the pioneers in programming an algorithm for choreography notation, which she designed specifically for camera and as a basis for her video dance script.
Between 1973 and 1976 Analivia Cordeiro started programming in Fortran IV a computerized dance system. With this notation system she obtained detailed choreographic instructions for dancers, TV directors, and cameramen. Her other computer-based video dance works 0°⇔45° (1974/1975), Gestures (1975), and Cambiantes (1976) are also sourced in this program. In 1983 Analivia Cordeiro, together with Nilton Lobo, began to program an innovative software for computer notation and recording of movements using three-dimensional features of images by computer processing. Her ambitious system Nota-Anna surpassed all the two-dimensional image-based notation systems that had existed at that time.
In the most performative and videographic approaches to the body from the 1970s and 1980s, Analivia Cordeiro exploits transdisciplinary aesthetics involving very contemporary choreography, artistic conception of space and scenography as well as an audiovisual language. Her experimental and engaged practices develop a singular computerized method combined with a subtle and poetic language.
This solo exhibition From Body to Code at ZKM will gather, for the first time in Europe, the most representative pieces of her artistic trajectory. A transdisciplinary artist par excellence, her intense and continuous research on human body movement was and continues to be decisive for Analivia Cordeiro’s work in the most different areas: in addition to dance and choreography, also in performance, audio-visual, photography, sculpture and painting. Her researches and projects were progressively moving into other areas, such as those of web-based productions and dance motion-capture App, but also those of interactive installations, co-authored by Nilton Lobo. However, technologies are never an end to her, but always a means to investigate the potentials of the expression of human body movement.
In this sense, the exhibition will present her first emblematic video art creations (computer-based video dance) from 1973 to 1976 in dialogue with a selection of the most representative works of her production from the decade of 1980 until today in the formats of video projection, video installation, interactive art, painting and sculpture. The exhibition will be complemented with original photographs, vintage notations and sketches, drawings and scripts of her projects, which document amplify the knowledge about her researches and work. The exhibition will also include a selection of portraits of the artist by renowned Brazilian photographer Bob Wolfenson from 1987 to 2020.
On the occasion of the exhibition ZKM will publish a book in English, which will compile her entire production since the 1970s. It will be the most complete compilation that has been made on the work of Cordeiro. The publication Analivia Cordeiro. From Body to Code includes photographic documentation and explanatory texts of all her works, as well as the main texts written by Analivia Cordeiro from 1973 to 2018 and a set of relevant historical documents, especially from the beginning of her career. The range of information is completed by the introductory texts on her work by Claudia Giannetti, curator of the exhibition and editor of the book, and Peter Weibel, chairman of ZKM, as well as historical and current texts written between 1980 and 2020 about her artistic production by various authors.
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Curator: Claudia Giannetti
Curatorial project management: Hanna Jurisch, Philipp Ziegler
Press contact: Anne Thomé / +49 721 81001220 / presse@zkm.de
