21st Contemporary Art Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil: Imagined Communities

The essay Imagined Communities, by North American historian Benedict Anderson, inspires the 21st Contemporary Art Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil, devoted to artistic experiences that conceive of and deepen community ties attuned to our times, forged upon identities, emotional relations, and affinities.

From the 5th floor of Sesc 24 de Maio, where most of the works by the 55 selected artists are located, the Biennial spills out into other spaces, offering the visitor a vast program that includes videos, performances, actions/ activations, meetings with artists, guided tours, seminars, and educational activities.

While the set of works presented at the 21st Biennial functions as a trigger for aesthetic and ethical statements through which to see our complex contemporary world anew, the Public Programs serve to explore and broaden the field of discussion proposed by this edition’s curatorial approach. They gather the voices of the participating artists with a multitude of others drawn from a variety of fields, inviting the public to join in a horizontal exchange.

The program proposes diverse formats of experience, including two modalities that bring artists, curators, and the general public into dialogue about the works on show and the ideas they embrace and express: first is the Southern Poetics meetings, held during the inaugural days of the Biennial; and, second, the guided tours through the exhibition space, led by different points of view, which will continue for the duration of the show.

Seminars
The importance of feeling the beating heart of the present and of imagining the future in the light of the pressing needs of our time—ideas central to the 21st Biennial—also sets the tone for the Seminars featuring, among others, the author and activist Lucy Lippard, the philosophers Peter Pál Pelbart and Vladimir Safatle, the psychoanalysts Maria Rita Kehl and Suely Rolnik, the Shuar leader and intellectual Ampam Karakras, the indigenous filmmaker Kamikia Kisêdjê, the artist Rosana Paulino, and the curators Lisette Lagnado and Paulo Herkenhoff. The themes the twelve panels will debate include the relationship between activism, the press, and art in LGBT-community productions, the limits and promises of political art, and contemporary feminisms seen from a decolonial perspective, together forming the backbone of one of the 21st Biennial’s publications.

Pooling voices sensitive to contemporary impasses, drawn from different fields, fronts, and backgrounds, the Seminars explore such themes as the invention of a new political imagination, the particularities of time that have emerged since the advent of virtual life, a decolonial approach to current feminisms, and the reverberation of the symbolic production of indigenous peoples and social movements.

A central axis on which the Public Programs are plotted at the 21st Biennial, the meetings are designed to generate opportunities to produce previously unheard-of forms of thinking the future, both around and beyond the works on display, and with room for discussion and dissension.

Artistic director: Solange Farkas
Curatorial team: Gabriel Bogossian, Luisa Duarte and Miguel López

Public Programs/Seminars:     
October 15–17
November 12–14