avaf: alterações vividas absolutamente fantasiosas

From May to July 2023, Sesc São Paulo is holding a retrospective featuring more than 20 years of work by the art collective avaf, an acronym for assume vivid astro focus. Founded in 2001, this collective varies its members according to its projects—which are likewise multiple, with a wide range of media including installations, painting, sculpture, tapestry, neon, wallpaper and others.

Held in São Paulo’s bustling downtown region, at Sesc Avenida Paulista, the exhibition is titled in a way that encourages wordplay with different possible meanings for the acronym avaf: in Portuguese, alterações vividas absolutamente fantasiosas means something like “absolutely fantastic lived alterations.” Based on this play on words, viewers are invited to create their own versions—ask very awesome fantasies? alliterations violently arrange famine? You, the reader, can invent your own.  

In avaf’s work, everything is conceived in light of its impact on the viewer, who is always the focus. The constant aim is to maximize the visitors’ visual impressions; their experience is the cornerstone of every project.  

Visitors will find a narrative that retraces the collective’s history in the form of a large labyrinth, with about 30 wallpapers. Inside the labyrinth, there are also two immersive rooms and two other painted walls. The exhibition design plays with the essence of the labyrinth as something that fosters an experience of getting lost and then finding oneself. Thus, connections are forged between the outer world and introspection, between dialogues of past and present.

avaf conceives and creates its wallpapers as landscapes, designed and resized specifically according to each exhibition space they occupy. The works are not pieces in the strict sense of the word, but are rather rearrangeable, remixable and ephemeral. Color is used as a universal language, with the aim of ensuring viewer participation and engagement. While the wallpapers narrate the collective’s creative history—proposing a journey through avaf’s various works, periods and shifting roster of members—they take on a real pictorial manifestation and then disappear, thus signifying the importance that transformation assumes for the collective itself. 

The exhibition also features works in other media, including painting, sculpture, neon and video. The videos expand the viewer’s sensory experience and operate as an extension of the wallpapers, projected edge to edge—just as they also appear through a number of circular openings, like in a peep show. One of the audiovisual works is a documentary of the House of Chroma performance. A second video compiles backdrops made for the DJ Honey Dijon, while a third shows different phrases that the acronym avaf can assume, along with various creations by the collective and others. The game of creating different phrases out of the avaf acronym is in perfect keeping with avaf’s essence, in which everything is transformed all the time. This constant transformation that the collective undergoes resonates in their representations: the works challenge stereotypes and become both confrontation and lyricism. In this sense, the installation constructs a queer identity, not only in regard to gender identity, but also, and mainly, in the sense of presenting artistic results that shatter all the viewers’ expectations.