Mercosur Visual Arts Biennial 12 announces curatorial team

Appointed by the Mercosur Visual Arts Biennial Foundation to take over as head curator of Biennial 12, Argentinian writer, professor and researcher Andrea Giunta has chosen the assistant curators responsible for the next edition of the contemporary art exhibition. Polish Dorota Biczel and Brazilian Fabiana Lopes and Igor Simões will join Giunta in the curating committee for the event, to be held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, from April 16 to July 5, 2020.

The curators have chosen the title of Biennial 12, which will be Feminine(s). Visualities, Actions and Affections. The exhibition will focus on the proposals by female artists and all non-binary, genderfluid and non-normative sensitivities, especially from people that express themselves in opposition to the most various forms of violence and that share the aspiration of a social order that is less oppressive and discriminatory in terms of gender. The curators intend to highlight the relevance of creativity in order to abrade limits and constraints, making itself richer thanks to the creations of those working with materials and techniques that are traditionally attributed to arts associated with women and sharing a collective exercise at devising new ways of doing, saying, thinking and creating in a democratic environment.

Andrea Giunta is a writer, curator, and professor at Universidad de Buenos Aires, where she received her PhD. She is Principal Researcher at CONICET, Argentina, and visiting scholar at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of several books on Latin American art, including Avant-garde, Internationalism and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). In 2018, she published Feminismo y arte latinoamericano: Histórias de artistas que emanciparon el cuerpo (Buenos Aires:  Siglo XXI, 2018, forthcoming by the University of California Press). She was a co-curator of Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 (2017–2018, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Brooklyn Museum, New York, and Pinacoteca de São Paulo).

Igor Simões has a PhD in Visual Arts - Art History, Theory and Criticism from the PPGAV (Graduate Program in Visual Arts) at UFRGS. Assistant professor in the Art History, Theory and Criticism and Art Teaching Methodology and Practice course at UERGS. Member of the curating committee of the National Association of Plastic Art Researchers-ANPAP, and member of the UERGS-MARHS Education Hub. Member of the collection committee at the Rio Grande do Sul Museum of Art-MARGS. He works with articulations between exhibitions, film editing/montage, art history, and the racialization of Brazilian art and the visibility of black individuals in the visual arts world. Author of thesis Film Montage and exhibitions: Black Voices in the White Cube of Brazilian Art. Member of Flume - Education and Visual Arts Research Group.

Dorota Biczel (Poland/USA) holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and currently serves as Visiting Assistant Professor in Art History at the University of Houston. Her research, writing, and curatorial projects focus on contemporary Latin American art seen in the global context, particularly at the intersections of material experimentation, social practice, and politics. She has published articles and essays in academic journals such as Caiana, Buildings & Landscapes, Art Journal, ARARA, and alter/nativas, and in exhibition catalogs. She curated Moving Mountains: Extractive Landscapes of Peru at UT’s Visual Arts Center (2016) and co-curated Teresa Burga’s Chronology:  Reports, Diagrams, Intervals (2011, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart), among other projects.

Fabiana Lopes is an independent curator based in New York and São Paulo, and a PhD student in Performance Studies at New York University, being a Corrigan Doctoral Fellow. Her research is focused on contemporary productions by of African Diaspora artists in Brazil and the Americas. Her works have been published in Harper’s Bazaar Art, O Menelick 2o Ato, ARTE!Brasileiros, Contemporary And (C&) and also in exhibition catalogs, including Rosana Paulino: Costura da Memória, Pinacoteca, São Paulo (2018), Lucia Laguna: Vizinhança, MASP, São Paulo (2018), Of Darkness and of Light, Minnette Vári, Johannesburg (2016), and Territórios: Artistas Afrodescendentes no Acervo da Pinacoteca, Pinacoteca, São Paulo (2015).