Ana Vaz: A câmera é o corpo (The Camera is the Body)

Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean stages the first major museum exhibition dedicated to Brazilian artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz (b. 1986, Brasília).

For over fifteen years, Vaz has developed a practice that cuts across disciplinary boundaries, placing cinema and visual arts in dialogue with fields such as anthropology, ecology, philosophy and political thought. Her films and installations engage with some of the urgent questions of our time, from the enduring legacies of colonial modernity to environmental devastation, tracing their entanglement and effects on territories and their communities, whether human, animal, vegetal or spectral. In her works, Vaz pays particular attention to the scars, ghosts and silenced stories that inhabit these territories, as well as the forms of resistance and resilience that arise from them.

Drawing from both experimental film and the cinemas of the Global South, Vaz questions the inherited structures of the cinematic gaze: the camera as an instrument of observation and mastery. Instead, she proposes a reciprocal form of attention, in which filmmaking becomes a practice of encounter and relation rather than one of capture or extraction. She advocates for an “embodied cinema” in which body and affects take precedence.

A câmera é o corpo unfolds within a scenographic environment that transforms Mudam’s architecture into an active participant and places the body at the heart of the cinematic experience. Visitors enter a space in which images, sounds, voices and perspectives unfold through a spatial montage composed by the artist. Bringing together films, installations and photographic works, including new productions, the exhibition is organised around a central space dedicated to encounters, performances and myriad forms of conviviality. This “agora”, conceived in collaboration with São Paulo-based studio a.ferrari.arquitetura and curator Fernanda Brenner, will be activated by local collectives and some of Vaz’s longtime collaborators, revealing filmmaking’s collective nature. It also features a fanzine by Vaz and publisher Nuno da Luz that will evolve throughout the exhibition, in a space that becomes a living organism, reflecting Vaz’s ambition to move beyond the simple presentation of films and broaden conventional understandings of what cinema can be. 

Featured is Vaz’s three-channel film installation É Noite na América (It is Night in America, 2022). Filmed at the Brasília Zoo, home to rescued animals, the work explores the contamination of the natural world by urban expansion. Shot on expired 16mm film and employing the day-for-night technique, it reflects on the displacement and extinction of animal species by weaving together multiple perspectives.  

Several works extend Vaz’s investigations into the layered histories and exploitation of the territories that constitute Brazil, with the legacies of colonialism woven throughout. These include Apiyemiyekî? (2019) and Terra preta (2025), the latter resulting from a cameraless process in which Vaz buried unexposed film in terra preta, an ancient anthropogenic fertile soil found throughout parts of the Amazon Basin. The resulting work gives rise to a “cinema of shadows”, in which the earth itself becomes both the maker and the subject of the image. Another gallery focuses on Vaz’s film series Meteoro (2023–26), the latest chapter of which, Météore: Nous avons renoncé au Soleil (Meteor: We Have Renounced the Sun, 2026), was created for the exhibition. Presented as dual projections, the four films portray Paris, Porto and Rome as spectral cities haunted by their colonial pasts and possible futures. 

Conceived by Vaz and Mudam’s Publics and Artistic Departments, a public programme extends the questions raised by the exhibition through workshops, readings, listening sessions, conversations and performances, including the restaging of Sinfonia do fogo (Symphony of Fire, 1985/2001), a musical work by Vaz’s father, Guilherme Vaz, a pioneer of conceptual and sound art in Brazil, for the Philharmonie Luxembourg.

The exhibition also marks the publication of the first monograph devoted to Vaz’s work, edited by Brenner and published by Mudam and JRP|Editions. 

Curated by Christophe Gallois, Senior Curator at Mudam, assisted by Adèle Wester and Léa Kelsen.

With the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation – Delegation in France