Publication outlines the broad scenario of contemporary art from the global South
The 19th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc Videobrasil outlines the wide-ranging scenario of contemporary art produced in the global South. Comprising artwork by 57 artists from this symbolic territory—with widely varied backgrounds, practices, and visions—the exhibitions Southern Panoramas | Selected Works and Southern Panoramas | Commissioned Projects will now have a print platform that enables in-depth reflection about the featured artists and artworks, extending their reach beyond the space and time in which the exhibits are taking place.
Released on November 25, the book Southern Panoramas | Selected Works and Commissioned Projects explores the issues brought up by the eponymous 19th Festival exhibits, through artwork reviews signed by the guest curators Bernardo José de Souza (Brazil), Bitu Cassundé (Brazil), João Laia (Portugal), and Júlia Rebouças (Brazil). The publication also offers interviews with the artists selected to create commissioned projects for the Festival, as well as short biographies of all participants. Images of the artworks, project sketches, and overviews of the shows, which are ongoing at Sesc Pompeia and Galpão VB until December 6, are featured in the book, edited in partnership by Edições Sesc São Paulo and Associação Cultural Videobrasil.
In the publication, the curators explore commonalities between 19th Festival shortlisted works, organizing them around four broad conceptual axes: “The first of these rests upon the idea of heightened crisis…Another body of work explores a post-utopian atmosphere…A third set features works in which the banal image…reveals under-layers of sexuality, violence, and beauty…A fourth movement announces possibilities for a new engagement of the subject in the world.” Also evident in this pool of artworks is the heterogeneous set of media and supports used by the artists in this edition, attesting to the previously video-oriented Festival’s evolvement into a platform open to all forms of artistic expression, and evincing the diversity of formal strategies of artists from this region. At the same time, the marked presence of video demonstrates the “ongoing vitality of the moving image in the global South, thus reflecting the Festival’s own history,” as pointed out by Solange Farkas, the Festival’s chief curator and Videobrasil director.
The book also highlights the unprecedented open call for projects comissioning, which broadened the Festival’s scope of action and endowed its curatorial research with new meaning, reaffirming its vocation to recognize and bet on relevant artistic proposals. The four projects selected, by Carlos Monroy (Colombia), Cristiano Lenhardt (Brazil), Keli-Safia Maksud (Kenya), and Ting-Ting Cheng (Taiwan), expand upon the repertoire of 19th Festival issues and were developed in a process of intense exchange between the artists and the curatorial committee. Employing different strategies, the resulting artworks address the existing tensions “between the symbolic creations produced in different regions of the world, the nature of the multiple identities forged within the context of the geopolitical South and the ways culture is produced, circulated, and legitimitized across this vast region.” In interviews given to the curators, the artists discuss their influences, background, research lines, and poetics.
As a strategy for increasing visibility of the selected artworks and projects, as well as knowledge of the processes of participating artists, the Festival also releases exclusive content via PLATFORM:VB (an online research tool featuring statements from artists in connection with artworks, references, and contents brought together by Videobrasil) and via the documentaries and interviews produced for Channel VB.
In Brazil, the publication is on sale at bookstores, from Sesc’s e-shop, at Sesc São Paulo brick-and-mortar units, and at Galpão VB, the headquarters of Associação Cultural Videobrasil, which offers the full collection of books, magazines and documentaries produced by the partnership Videobrasil and Edições Sesc São Paulo, as well as publications by the publishers Cobogó and Cosac Naify. International orders can be placed by email.
Coordinator and text editor: Teté Martinho. Collaborators: Bernardo José de Souza, Bitu Cassundé, João Laia, Júlia Rebouças and Solange Farkas. Graphic Design: Angela Detanico & Rafael Lain. Edições Sesc São Paulo & Associação Cultural Videobrasil, 2015, 288pp. Portuguese / English. 18 x 23 x 2 cm. ISBN: 978-85-69298-53-3
