October 25, 2015
10th Mercosul Biennial
Messages from a New America
October 23–December 6, 2015
www.fundacaobienal.art.br
The 10th Mercosul Biennial has opened to the public in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and runs from October 23 to December 6. This edition of the biennial is dedicated exclusively to art from Latin America, searching for its roots and presenting a new curatorial model that goes against the grain by including works from the early 18th century to the present. Titled Messages from a New America, this large-scale exhibition seeks to break new ground on shifting the attention to innovative curatorial platforms for the art of Latin America. The 10th Mercosul Biennial is curated by art historian and curator Dr. Gaudêncio Fidelis (Brazil), Chief Curator Márcio Tavares (Brazil), Adjunct Curator, Assistant Curator Ana Zavadil (Brazil), and Educational Curator Cristián G. Gallegos (Chile).
The Biennial consists of seven major exhibitions, interconnected and built to encompass a number of issues concerning the art of the region, some of which are dealt with for the first time anywhere, such as smell and dust as material reality of the art objects. The exhibitions are: The Biography of Urban Life; Modernism in Parallax; Neobaroque Anthropophagy; Olfactory: Smell in Art; Body Apparatuses; Dust and the World of Objects; and Marginália of Form. The Biennial occupies several venues throughout the city of Porto Alegre, including the Rio Grande do Sul Museum of Art, Santander Cultural, Mercosul Museum of Human Rights, Usina do Gasômetro, CEEE Cultural Center, Acervo Independente, and InstitutoLing.
"This biennial represents a unique opportunity to view a vast range of work alongside each other and introduces a new model for exhibitions within a biennial context. It was created by choosing specific works, encompassing an extensive arc spanning from the historical to the contemporary. Instead of representing artists, we sought to highlight their artistic contributions related to specific issues," says Mr. Fidelis.
"This platform abandons the model of commissions that is typical of biennials and focused instead on searching for works that show the extraordinary field of aesthetics that appears throughout the historical trajectory of creativity that brings forth sources for innovation and creativity. The exhibition takes into account legibility, cultural specificity, historical priority and criticism of the Western canon, thereby reactivating, producing and circulating original knowledge about these works instead of just celebrating them."
The curatorial platform of the 10th Biennial includes canonical and non-canonical works, as well as works considered by the curators as "blind spots" due to a conspicuous absence from criticism, art history narratives and curatorial endeavors which have failed to take such works into account.
