38th Panorama of Brazilian Art, “Mil graus”

The Tupi people roasted their prisoners on a grill called a “moquém” before eating them in anthropophagic rituals.1 Frederico Filippi’s Moquém - Carnes de caça (2023–24) presents the fragments of two tractors incinerated during a Federal Police raid in Itaituba, Pará, on just such an iron grid. The installation riffs on interrelated struggles—people versus machines and among themselves, and machines against each other—to produce an absurdist allegory on the suicidal nature of certain forms of “progress.” Nearby, Zimar’s jesting zoomorphic masks, Careta de Cazumba (2024), traditionally worn in parades and here made from found materials, such as motorcycle helmets, PVC, rubber, wigs, or animal bones, appear to be mocking Fillipi’s charred materials. Zahỳ Tentehar’s short science-fiction video Máquina Ancestral: Ureipy (2023), on the opposite wall, shows the artist wandering through a ruined factory in the jungle. This triad of works proposes a critical reading of excessive industrial ambition, and of the relationship between ancestral Indigeneous traditions and capitalism. They represent the boiling point of this heated 38th edition of Panorama, the biennial temperature-check of Brazilian contemporary art.

Panorama is inextricably linked to the Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM), and has nurtured the institution’s collection since its inception in 1969. This year, due to structural reforms, the exhibition moved to the MAC USP, whose narrow rooms and low ceilings are ill-suited to collective shows distributed along conceptual axes such as this one. Perhaps for this reason, the curatorial team of Germano Dushá, Thiago de Paula Souza, and Ariana Nuala has divided the catalogue into themes (“General Ecology,” “Original Territories,” “Tropical Lead,” “Body-Devices,” and “Trances and Crossings”) that are not reflected in the organization of work in the space. The exhibition therefore has one arranging principle in the gallery and another on paper.

The overall title, “Mil graus” [a thousand degrees], derives from a colloquial expression for the point of greatest intensity. That same energy—a maximum concentration—supposedly inhabits the artworks. Indeed, several works and the relationships between them, including those mentioned above, seem to vibrate at a highly stimulating frequency. Others, however, remain inert.

Like many recent exhibitions of a similar size, “Mil Graus” presents a mix of recurring themes that can feel unmanageable. It’s as if the inclusion of concepts ranging from ecology and the post-Anthropocene world to colonization, queerness, identity, ritualism, or the sometimes-disconcerting mix of the esoteric and the political, all melted into the same pot, were a mandatory bureaucratic requirement. That the title of this Panorama edition came from urban street slang yet aims to include indigenous forms and thoughts further clarifies the point. The curatorial approach may have originated in the 32nd edition of the Sao Paulo Biennial in 2016, further iterated in this year’s Venice Biennale: a vindication of indigenous art, not according to its relevance to contemporary concerns, but at the fetishistic instigation of the most influential museums and galleries in the world.2

At one end of the room are works by the artist and spiritual leader Dona Romana (a mural-sized photograph of her carved stone pieces dating from 1989), clay sculptures by Mestre Nado and Sallisa Rosa, Paulo Pires’s sandstone sculptures, stones painted with animal motifs by Maria Lira Marques, and drawings by Joseca Mokahesi Yanomami (who also exhibited at Venice this year). This section displays visual languages linked to worldviews that, just a few years ago, were not the subject of attention from the mainstream contemporary art system. In many cases, they were not made to be shown in a white cube or museum context—these are limited and idiosyncratic spaces, at least when it comes to displaying works and objects made not to be admired for their appearance but for their spiritual value or symbolic use. The large-format photograph of the stones carved by Dona Romana, for instance, flattens a ceremonial open-air space into a two-dimensional image.

Today, however, such works are highly sought-after in Brazil, and the suspicion is that many were selected to fit into a curatorial trend.3 The results can be paradoxical, such as with Maria Lira Marques, a contemporary artist who presents recent pieces that could easily pass as pre-Columbian replicas, because of their technique, materiality, and the schematic way in which she represents animal and human figures. It begs the question of why, whenever an artist of indigenous origin is presented in these exhibitions, their art is so often tasked with speaking of the mythological and the spiritual, following ancestral procedures and aesthetics.

“Mil Graus” admits other artistic forms linked to the digital and the concerns of the metropolitan citizen of the twenty-first century. Marcus Deusdedit’s video installation Untitled (2024), from the series “Performance,” shows a CGI bodybuilder taking his obsession with physical exercise to the extreme, while Melissa de Oliveira’s photographs (Aquecimento and Sucessagem, 2024) seize the vitality and risk of street cultures on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, portraying young people proudly pulling motorcycle stunts in acts that are as political as they are cultural.

There are a few exceptions that neither confront contemporary problems, nor tread on the heels of the ancestral—and this autonomous character makes them refreshing. The small paintings of invented and fantastic landscapes by Lucas Arruda (from the series “Deserto-Modelo,” 2024), displayed in a room within a room that creates a more private viewing experience, are an escape from an exhibition that elsewhere feels like a missed opportunity. What this Panorama undoubtedly succeeds at is representing the zeitgeist of Brazilian art.