Laura Lima: The Naked Magician
10 September–30 November 2014
Experiences of Brazilian Art and Film from the 1960s and 70s
10 September–23 November 2014
Bonniers Konsthall
Torsgatan 19
SE-11390 Stockholm
Sweden
Hours: Wednesday noon–8pm,
Thursday–Sunday noon–5pm
T +46 (0) 8 7364248
Bonniers Konsthall is proud to present the first Scandinavian solo exhibition with Brazilian artist Laura Lima.
The Naked Magician, the central piece after which the exhibition is named, consists of a person playing the role of the magician, and a copious number of collected objects. The installation is constantly transforming, appearing differently depending on what the varying magicians decide to do with the objects. The Naked Magician contains a powerful charge between the apparent and the unspoken. The magician openly reveals all tricks to the public, the sleeveless tailcoat making it impossible to hide any cards up the sleeves. But what the magician eventually creates, just what part of it is magical, remains a secret.
Living beings, such as humans and animals, is the raw materials in Lima’s large-scaled installations, where the boundary between the dead and the living, nature and society, body and building blurs. The choreography of the body’s movements within the space created by Laura Lima out of objects and scenography is an essential part of her work. What she presents to us is so much more than mere flesh; she displays a body sculpted by society, by our system of symbols. The set design is a sort of script, a manual enabling the performance to be re-enacted. It is a language the bodies move within, making them comprehensible to the viewer, and yet, like any language, it comes complete with a full register of ambivalences, nuances, and interpretive possibilities which differ from one another every time a new magician uses the room.
The exhibition features Lima’s large-scale installations alongside a series of smaller works, pieces concealing their own well-hidden secrets. As part of the exhibition is also a unique opportunity to experience Laura Lima’s monumental work Cinema Shadow—a film installation in which a film is shot and screened simultaneously during one whole day. This version of Cinema Shadow is carried out 11 November in collaboration with Stockholm Film Festival at Berns in Stockholm.
Laura Lima was born in 1971 in Governador Valadares, Brazil. She currently lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Together with renowned artists Ernesto Neto and Marcio Botner, she is the founder of the Rio-based internationally acclaimed gallery A Gentil Carioca. Lima contributed her work Marra—a physically demanding struggle between two male bodies—to Bonniers Konsthall’s autumn 2011 exhibition The Spiral and The Square.
The exhibition is a collaboration between Bonniers Konsthall and the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland. A catalogue will accompany the exhibition.
Experiences of Brazilian Art and Film from the 1960s and 70s
Like many of her contemporaries, Laura Lima is greatly inspired by the groundbreaking Brazilian artists of the 1960s and ’70s who expanded the artistic field through the development of performance art as a more elastic definition of sculpture. It is impossible to avoid mentioning Brazilian artists Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and Hélio Oiticica, three predecessors who pioneered atmosphere, movement and change as components of a work of art. In order to reveal the world of Lima, Bonniers Konsthall present an accompanying presentation of both old and new film material, including art videos, documentaries and feature films, which offers a glimpse of an outstandingly active, engaging era in Brazilian art.
For more information about the exhibition and the programme, please visit www.bonnierskonsthall.se. For press images, visit Bonniers Konsthall’s image bank on mynewsdesk.
For further information, please contact contact Sofia Curman, Information Officer at Bonniers Konsthall: sofia.curman [at] bonnierskonsthall.se / T +46 8 736 42 66.
