Charlie Levine, Artist International Development Funding Grant
BACKGROUND
I have always been interested in how people and ideas connect; I am especially interested in in/visible links. As a curator I like noticing similarities in approaches and themes, or similar visual cues and inspirations in creative practices and finding interesting ways to showcase them. In line with Jens Hoffman’s thinking I believe “curatorial operations and modes of enquiry come closer to the field of anthropology than to that of art history”.[1]
This approach to my practice began in Birmingham, UK, prior to and mostly when I ran a gallery called TROVE in a two-blue plaque heritage site, 2009 – 2014. The gallery, sited in the Jewellery Quarter, was where George Elkington invented metal plating and where Parkesine plastic (now known as celluloid) was also invented by employee Alexander Parkes. After the Elkington & Co metal plating factory closed down, the site became home to Birmingham’s Science and Industry Museum before the collection was relocated in 2001 to Millennium Point to make up the Thinktank Museum.
TROVE was founded in the former Engine Room of the Museum, the only part of the Museum not to be knocked down as it was listed. This incredible history directed the programming of the gallery with exhibitions linking back to the site’s heritage. I’ve continued this thinking through devising annual programmes throughout the Borough of Camden that respond to a theme relevant to the location/time (Camden 50), curating exhibitions at other Birmingham heritage sites (Thrift Radiates Happiness), and curating online projects as a way to bring creative communities together over a single theme (Cornered Stories), working site responsively has always been a factor in my curatorial approach and I have continued to work in this way of responding to site and local communities.
TRAVEL BURSARY
“Globalisation has probably had the most impact on the art world in recent decades.”[2]
In January 2018 I was awarded a British Council and Arts Council England Artist International Development Fund grant to visit Mumbai, India and Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil.
In 2016 I curated a cultural programme in Camden, entitled Camden Sentido, which celebrated the links between the London borough and Brazil to coincide with the Rio de Janeiro Para/Olympic Games and the 2016 São Paulo Biennale. As part of this programme I launched a new international strand to the London Borough of Camden’s annual arts programme and invited Brazilian artists and galleries over to the UK to be part of the conversation. One artist in particular, Gustavo Ferro, and I continued the conversation beyond the programme and he became my host artist in Brazil.
Last year, 2017, I initiated the Camden Kala programme and introduced the programme manager to several artists and galleries in India to coincide with the British Council initiative, the UK:India Year of Culture. Mumbai-based artist Vishwa Shroff spent 3 months in residency at Swiss Cottage Gallery. An artist I have worked with before at TROVE and on several other projects, Vishwa became my Mumbai host for the Artist International Development Fund grant.
Both Gustavo and Vishwa offered to introduce me to several artists and cultural organisations in Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and to see where the collaborations and exchanges could continue, with a hope to offer UK artists a return visit to these partner cities.
MUMBAI, INDIA
A whirlwind week in April 2018 in Mumbai, I spent 24/7 with UK artist Tash Kahn and Mumbai host artist, Vishwa Shroff. This week was incredibly inspirational, with ideas popping up around every corner. As Hans Ulrich Obrist says: “Conversations…are obviously archival, but they are also a form of creating fertile soil for future projects.”[3] These conversations in India were definitely just that, with several new projects and opportunities being developed as a result of this short time in India, discussed later in this essay.
Whilst in Mumbai I visited Chemould Contemporary Art Gallery, Project 88, Mumbai Art Room, Chaterjee & Lal, Shaki, TARQ, The Guild and WAA Studios. Either through these gallery visits, studio visits or through a salon day at Shroff’s home I interviewed fourteen artists/curators/creatives.
I am fortunate that this was my fourth trip to Mumbai, however, this was a first with an agenda to meet and record conversations about exchange and people’s practices, specifically focusing in on place and space. I have invited my travel partner, artist Tash Kahn, host, artist Vishwa Shroff, and TARQ gallery director, Hena Kapadia to write an essay responding to these themes and to evolve some of the topics we talked about together, namely how site specificity and walking can influence their practice, and the importance of experiencing, and being seen in, an international context.
Whilst in Mumbai I was very interested in the linear quality of research within several of the artists practice, dividing conversations had into three topics: politics/mythologies, architecture/place, and collecting/anthropology.
Politics/Mythology
Shakuntala Kulkarni’s exhibition, Julus and Other Stories had an ambition to bring people together, like poetry and theatre, with a mix of objects/bits of costume displayed via traditional museum tropes, large drawings and film. Using a traditional craft output, woven jewellery/armour/costumes, set alongside delicate drawings in small and large scale of the female figure and a film of female warriors wearing the armour, this exhibition was an examination of the links between political marches and cultural processions and gatherings. It was an exhibition about blurring the lines between beauty and function, with Shakuntala Kulkarni exclaiming in response to a question about her ‘masculine’ appearance in her film work Julus and the marching within it as a male action, “I have the freedom to march how I want. I am neither male nor female”.
I first encountered Subrat Kumar Behera’s work at 2014’s Kochi Biennale. It was a room of drawings/watercolour paintings that read like a comic strip round the gallery wall, and it was a pleasure to meet the artist this visit and have him talk through his latest work, Hell of a paradise, a take on the heaven/hell divide as imagined by Subrat. This piece of work is “purposefully not political, rather proverbial and mythological”. Subrat takes traditional and non-traditional stories and mixes them together with his own, a collection of memories from various resources including films, encounters, family stories, story books and so on. Although the artist says this work is not political, it definitely leans towards a political commentary, with ‘God’ being a round table of people who represent parts of a ‘godly power’, these people including Albert Einstein, Gandhi, Stephen Hawking, Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler: “Indian Gods are both creators and destroyers, it’s important that the ‘God’ in this painting represents both.” Subrat is an interesting character who holds onto many stories and tales in his mind, and then brings them straight to the canvas, manipulating them to create new narratives and updated mythologies.
Vijay Shekon succinctly described himself as a “site specific and process-inspired artist”. Having lived, worked and studied in New York for several years he returned back to Mumbai in 2009 to a city he did and didn’t recognise. Since then his work, a mix of drawings and performances, looking at the political and social influences upon every day life in Mumbai. “I ripped up or burnt all of my New York work, I didn’t bring it back with me, I felt like I needed a new start”, and so he began to re-examine Mumbai with a slight outsider eye working on a drawing a day upon his return, “it was a great way to get back into the city, I only managed 62 days but it really helped get back into the rhythm of the city and my role as an artist in Bombay”. His work ranges from performances that look at the very political subject matter of Mumbai residents right to water (and that fact that not everyone in Mumbai can access water), through to beautiful paintings on paper of everyday life in his neighbourhood, whilst always looking at his place and role within his local community.
Architecture/Place
Sameer Kulavoor gave me a private tour of his third solo exhibition at TARQ, A Man of the Crowd. This exhibition was a series of paintings and sculptures that reflected on everyday life in Mumbai, focusing on snippets of life he had seen, all brought together to form abstract scenes in a non-descript metropolis focusing on the people and their actions. His chosen viewpoint is one of an observer, looking down upon a concrete square filled with people from all walks of life, not involved in each other’s routine, rather alone in their actions, and brought together in this imagined place. Sameer said, “the people are old memories from all over the world, but the place is always a Bombay”. He went on, “I am used to watching constant change in Bombay, especially politically and in public spaces. These people [in my paintings] are always moving, changing spaces, and I watch them, purposefully, so I can observe how they change a place or what changes they have upon it. I want to notice”.
A chance encounter with artist Amshu Chukki on a boat ride to Alibaug allowed an insight into his approach, which very much mimicked the conversations between Tash, Vishwa and myself during my visit, “you can walk the same route everyday and you will always spot something new”. Amshu’s work looks at the complex way Mumbai is constructed, “Bombay isn’t defined areas, they all link together, a city ever moving into one another”. This is something several of the artists I met commented on, the fact that Mumbai is always shifting shape, purpose, and how that impacts upon the people who live, visit and work there. Amshu works mostly site responsively, something I am very interested in, and we discussed the question, what happens to site specific works after it leaves the site? And has the original site changed as a result?
Ceramicist Sukhdev Rathod writes down every idea he has, lists and lists of them, with works only coming to fruition when an opportunity links to a specific idea and place. His most recent work is a beautiful set of ceramic circles, each imprinted with a different rock of where he spends most of his evenings: “We can’t get wifi in the house, so most nights we walk to the beach, sit on these rocks and check our emails using the nearby café’s wifi.” This site-specific work reflects Sukhdev’s instant surroundings, something that links with his list making, often ideas being fleeting for the moments he finds himself in. He is a natural collector, translating moods or moments into creative project ideas.
I have worked with Pratap Morey before on Cornered Stories, an ongoing online project I am working on with my host Vishwa. This meeting with Pratap, however, was the first time I got to visit his studio in North Bombay and see his new work that is directly inspired by his involvement in Cornered Stories. “I moved from Bombay to Baroda and back to Bombay, and with each move I got to look at the cities in different ways. I liked dissecting buildings and developments, I started creating portraits of places through abstractly putting myself within them using just parts of my body.” His view of the city is like ‘Tetris,’ his drawings, digital and 3D collages represent the moving building blocks of a city, layer upon layer of buildings moved to sit within each other, and within available spaces. Pratap’s practice is slow and steady, but also furious at times, mimicking the city and how it gets constructed, which is also seen in a series of ‘glitch’ works – how buildings get quickly fixed and repaired which creates a glitch to the original building, something he began to notice whilst in residency in Korea where this did not happen.
Teja Gavanka is an artist with a very linear practice with one piece of work inspiring the next, her line drawings, sculptural manipulation of spaces and interventions are all part of a bigger vision, to look at “mind spaces and inside spaces while working with line and the plane of real spaces”. Teja’s work was wonderful, smart, and subtle, she specifically noted that some of her public realm work should go ‘unnoticed’ however loves when the exchange between a building and her intervention is acknowledge, but she doesn’t reply on that for the pieces to work. Teja is one of several artists we met who look at space and the city in such a unique way that I left looking at Bombay in a different way, “Bombay is a vertical city, it encourages you to look up”.
My final studio visit of the whole trip was with my host, Vishwa Shroff. I have worked with, commissioned, curated and been inspired by Vishwa since I hosted her for a residency at TROVE in 2012. Rather than host the studio visit my travelling partner, artist Tash Kahn, led the conversation and it was amazing to re-look through new eyes many of Vishwa’s latest works. Tash was specifically drawn to Vishwa’s window works, which have popped up in several projects. Having spent several years in Tokyo, Japan, Vishwa noticed how windows were used as additional storage spaces rather than as things to open/let light in. So whilst walking round Tokyo she noted what the various objects were that the windows housed from laundry to kitchen utensils, and this is where her imagination started, “who lives there? What are they doing? What do these objects tell me about them?” and from there she created a wonderful project, Postulating Premises, with her husband and collaborator Katsushi Goto, which let her delve into this questions and imagine the answers. Vishwa’s practice is drawing based and inspired by the places she sees, passes through or lives within.
Collecting/Anthropology
In my host Vishwa’s home was an incredible paper relief of a deconstructed bird. The detail and anthropological nature reminded me of the Natural History Museum, and the drawers of bird specimens. Later when I met the artist, Nisha Sikander, I was amazed to learn she gets her inspiration from her Grandfather who is a famous naturalist, and her cousin, ‘The Birdman of India’, Salim Ali, a famous ornithologist. Nisha says, “I grew up in a tropical environment with lots of naturalists, I subconsciously was attracted to birds and insects I think, there were always books and research lying around, and I often had to be quiet as a child to not scare away the birds. We would sit for hours and just listen for them”. She currently only creates these paper reliefs out of birds and moths local to her home, those she grew up with. Her technique is beautifully delicate layers and layers of paper cut to closely resemble feathers/wings combined to become whole animals, directly inspired from taxidermy and museum collections. Her whole animals are now being deconstructed to show elements of each animal, and now she also shows the negative paper sheets, each layer of deconstruction making the viewer more aware of the delicate process these works go through, “I don’t want the works to lose their awe of making, I want audiences to know the work behind them”.
Graphic designer, Kruti Saraiya, is an incredible sketchbook keeper and translator of words and places, “I started making sketch books as I wasn’t confident in my drawing skills at first, and the books were private spaces for collages and ways to keep an alternative diary of my holidays”. It was such a pleasure to be able to leaf through her many sketchbooks, and see her ongoing postcard exchange project with Vishwa. This personal practice of Kruti’s, and her love of words, “their roots, especially of foreign languages, I will always design words in a way that helps me understand them and then learn them as a result”, has made its way into her professional practice. When designing the logo for the BDL Museum in Mumbai she made sure she considered, “how do you introduce a museum to people who don’t access culture? The logo needs to speak to these people and those familiar with the museum, so I elevated the coat of arms to be the primary image with the English text being the secondary part”. As a result, her work now looks at interesting entry points to language, “it’s not about learning in a textbook way, I want to create gateways through what you’re interested in”, and always through her unique style and approach, and always originating from a sketchbook drawing.
TARQ is a 4-year-old commercial gallery in Mumbai that is already breaking the mould. Director, Hena Kapadia, has grown TARQ organically and works from the premise that “parties aren't important, socialising is”. And this ethos is seen in the artists she works with and how the gallery is a welcoming space for conversation and experimentation, and not just a place to be seen. Having studied Art World Practice at Christies, Hena says that she actually learnt how to run a successful and innovative gallery though doing, “I wanted to shake up the art scene in Bombay, it felt dead, I wanted to switch the light on”, and that she did. Returning recently, when I met with her, from a sold out show at Art Basel Hong Kong she is taking the world by storm and definitely shaking things up, with traditional Indian collectors wanting to buy traditional Indian artists, she is teaching old and new buyers new ways of looking and investing, “oil on canvas is no longer valuable, I am re-educating buyers that it’s not all oil and sculpture, it’s watercolour, photography, paper, collage. It’s moving on, they have to, too.”
Shivaji Gaekwad is a specialist working for Sotheby’s India and allowed us a great insight into the Indian collecting scene, and how there are three types of collector, the private collectors, the ‘taste maker’ collectors and the speculators. “There are only six people or less in India who collect Western art”, Shivaji told us, while comparing the pre and post 2009 crash art worlds, “but collectors want to invest in Indian artists who have a Western reputation for exhibitions”. The Sotheby’s art world is a very different one to TARQ, with Sotheby’s being about long standing buyers and auctions rather than the personal touch of TARQ, but Sotheby’s is not without its edge, with Shivaji telling us about an auction a few years ago of fake Indian artworks, “the scene is littered with fake art works, it’s Sotheby’s job to only sell artworks but also to authenticate”. He also told us, in line with Hena, that post the 2009 crash buyers stay with the artists they know, new galleries, such as TARQ, have to create new/their own buyers as the old circle does not adapt to change.
A visit to WAA Residency and Studio space allowed an insight into the North Bombay art scene, which is very different to the South Bombay set where I was staying. WAA’s administrator, Rashi, took us for a tour of the various studio and residency spaces, allowing us a chance meeting with curator Gitanjali Dang who has an office in the complex, and the studios of Gayatsi Kodikal and Ratna Gupta. WAA is open to all proposals and they were hosting their first musician on our visit, “it’s important WAA doesn’t just host artists, we proactively want to host curators, musicians and people developing creative projects”. The project space there is always active, with film nights and pop-up weekend long exhibitions, the highlight of the year, we were informed, is the January Open Studios, this is the moment the local community really comes together and people travel to WAA to see what’s going on. “We don’t curate our selected residents, but we do think more about what the studios might be doing in January for the Open Studio’s event, we want people to be bringing in something different and exciting, and usually try to work with international people at this point, too.”
RIO DE JANEIRO AND SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL
This June 2018 trip was my first ever to Brazil and I was very excited about the experience after having heard so much about it and the scene from the artists I had worked with in 2016. Sadly my host, Gustavo Ferro, was unable to be in Brazil at the time of my trip due to unforeseen circumstances. Although I was sad he would not be there for the visit I was pleased to have Tash Kahn, artist and DOLPH Gallery Director, accompany me again.
As Tash and I were left to our devices more on this trip, rather than staying with our host and having them with us all the time, I felt more of a cultural tourist than in Mumbai. This had the impact of feeling more explorative where we happened upon culture and conversation a little more. However, saying that Gustavo had introduced me to several artists and galleries that I had then arranged visits with, so although he was not present he had a huge impact on people I spoke with.
I have since commissioned Tash to write another article as she has seen both places with me but from an artist perspective, as well as my host Gustavo Ferro and UK based artist, Flora Parrott, who has partaken in many residencies in Brazil and it is integral to her artistic practice. These articles are about place and how changing perspectives or re-looking at a city can impact how you move around it.
Whilst in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo I was interested to learn more about the recent history of the country and its current political standing. I enjoyed discovering the social responsibility many of the artists felt and how most of their work reflected local history, politics and responses to local audiences.
As with Mumbai I did not allow myself enough time in both Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, however, the time there was incredibly fruitful. It was an incredible opportunity to see the places and have conversations with people my host, Gustavo, had previously spoken to passionately about. Like Mumbai these two Brazilian cities sat heavily on the artists I spoke with and were incredibly influential to everyone’s practice. I was able to speak with six artists and three galleries/ateliers in Rio de Janeiro and eight artists, two curators, two galleries and the Bienal in São Paulo.
Whilst in Brazil I was inspired by the diversity of artistic styles but the similarities in how everyone was responding to the current political landscape in Brazil, as result I have broken up my conversations into Communities/Built Environment, Politics/History and Dream Big.
Communities/Built Environment
I was fortunate to have a long conversation with Paul Heritage, Founder and Director of People’s Palace, an organisation that played a large part in the British Council’s cultural Olympic projects in London, 2012 and Rio de Janeiro, 2016. With projects that saw Brazilian artists create bespoke performances that took place in people’s homes in East London, in partnership with Battersea Arts Centre, through to initiating and continuing choirs made up of residents of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. It was incredibly interesting to hear how Paul started the organisation, in partnership with Queen Mary University, and continued to expand with thanks to some strategic fundraising and income generating work. Paul was very helpful in giving me an overview of Rio de Janeiro’s set up and how communities exist together in a very mixed and creative city and was very open with how they continue to realise their programmes and how you can have a successful career in brokering and realising projects with innovative international cultural relationships.
Daniel Murgel is a Rio de Janeiro based artist who runs Atelie Sanitario along with Leandro Barboza and Guga Ferraz. Daniel spoke the most fluent English so was our main point of contact at this space and whilst talking through their practice, in particular his and Leandro’s creative collaboration. They are working in a non-defined partnership looking at self constructed architecture and restoration, specifically how buildings get fixed or changed for purpose in an ad hoc way – something that was very apparent when walking around Rio de Janeiro, an up-cycling of buildings with a ‘make do and mend’ attitude. Daniel’s admiration for classical painters leaks into their work and they use domestic colours within their installations that he calls ‘think paintings’. Everything in their studio was part of these constructed think paintings, from the colour tests on the walls, to the small piles of dust, to the built sculptures made from found objects to Leandro’s day job, his architectural restoration work. The work that most caught my imagination whilst there was their newly built pizza oven on the roof of the atelier, a motif/object they want to build in communities and art spaces all over the world. Its sculptural appeal and functional one is what interests the artists, it’s about constructing with communities own creative infrastructures and creating spaces to ‘break bread’ and talk with one another.
Thelma Vilas Boas is an artist and local activist who whose primary focus is working in a local bar, Bar Delas, and serving the community that use it. She says it’s about taking care of people, and encouraging them to take care of each other outside of the bar setting, with the bar being more than just somewhere to come for a drink, it’s also an ‘activating space’ – a place where the community can come together and take part in creative activities whilst enjoying the traditional notion of what a ‘bar’ is. Vilas Boas’ art practice started out as film and photography production, however she has evolved and her work is now this social enterprise, the pub is owned by two women with her at the forefront of the activity programming. Her attitudes towards the local community are amazing, citing that some of the young people she works with, their parents call the pub their church. The bar is becoming an international beacon for Brazilian women taking charge with their onsite workshops covering everything from creating protest signs to debate the current political climate all through way through to discussing every day women’s rights.
Bruno de Almeida is a curator of two very interesting concepts/spaces in São Paulo, SITU and 1:1, with both exploring the links between art, architecture, city and community. Bruno works primarily with Latin American artists to create site-specific works. For SITU, the artists work with the external spaces of the Galeria Leme building with temporary and site-specific works, which relate both to the building and to the adjoining public space, while 1:1 is found on the top floor of Galeria Jaqueline Martins and out in the public realm near the gallery. Both of these programmes are unique and very inspiring. Bruno is a curator on the up, and is to be a de Appel student this year. He says of his approach, “by chaining a disparate series of artistic ideas that speak directly with the public space, my projects intend to continuously engage a broader and more heterogeneous audience, inviting them to think critically about the city and the processes that shape it”. Bruno wants to take the work directly into the community as well as keeping it within the gallery setting, smartly working with various audiences and levels of engagement and blurring the lines between institutional and every day criticism.
Bruno’s artist at 1:1 is currently João Loureiro who gave us a tour of his work in the gallery and also his local intervention in a supermarket around the corner from the space. João is primarily a sculptor who questions the everyday and the relationship between form and function and our habitual behaviours towards things. João’s work at 1:1 was incredible, a comment on Brazilian approaches to art, exchange, and the city, with a replica made from polystyrene with dead flies on of Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) which was exchanged in the 70’s with the UK for a Henry Moore’s Two-Piece Reclining Figure: Points (1969-70), which João has made in miniature in raw meat and displayed at the local supermarket’s meat counter. These two pieces speaking to each other across the Central district of São Paulo, with flies being released weekly that have been ‘hatched’ on old Moore meat replicas (as these get renewed every week so they keep fresh in the supermarket.) João spoke in length about his other work and Tash and I were very inspired by his approach of thinking laterally and stretching ideas to where you would not expect them to go.
Politics/History
Guga Ferraz is an urban artist who creates interventions into Rio de Janeiro’s landscape. Most often his work is politically charged and examines issues of urban violence and how individuals navigate/own the city and how you can make a city feel like a ‘place’. This political backbone to his work is something apparent in many conversations had with all artists on this trip. With the location of his studio being a few buildings down from a huge burial ground of 50,000 black slaves brought to Brazil by the Portuguese 500 years ago really grounds his work in the conversation about who owns the space, who built the space and how do the people of Brazil continue to grow, own and build upon it to create their own future and a better history.
There is a strong female art presence in Brazil with many of the women artists I spoke to also being strong political activists, another of these was Rio de Janeiro based artist Paula Dykstra. Paula spoke about her dislike of the term ‘artist’ as it denotes a form of betting on people in an economical sense. Her work focuses on looking at the divided art world, those who make work for money and those that don’t, she is the latter, however she works for a leading female collector in Brazil so sees both sides. She believes that self organising is the only way to get your voice heard and create real change in your communities and across the world with her work questioning, what is the power of an island? A question she said was as relevant for Brazilians as Tash and I as UK residents.
A trip to Atelie397 in São Paulo made for a wonderful meeting with artist and curator, Flora Leite. She has curated the current exhibition, Que Barra, in the space and walked us around it as well as gave us a look at her own practice. Flora’s work is site specific in nature and heavily politicised. Always looking for the ‘odd spaces’ in buildings to use or looking at historical stories to re-tell she wants to examine meaning and material, “materialisation – what is matter’s (political) meaning?” Her latest work, a firework recreation of the Southern Cross star constellation embodies several of her artistic themes, including astrology, looking at the power of real vs. fake, discovery and ownership – the stars were named by someone, they did not name themselves. The latter point being something she, as a Brazilian artist, examines a lot in her work specifically how Brazil as a country came into being and the colonising of it by the Portuguese. And this political edge to her work is seen in the exhibition at Atelie397 with the artists responding to or being selected for their resonance with May 1968, and the 50th anniversary of a huge Brazilian political crisis. In 1968, Flora tells us, there was a huge preoccupation to look at LGBT culture, race, feminism, and questions about freedom. Brazil was the place to experiment types of freedoms and how this needs to happen again, and many of these conversations are starting up again in today’s world political climate. Flora says, “my daily life, when I am making, do I feel most free. But there’s no such thing as absolute freedom”.
Dream Big
On a visit to BREU space in São Paulo and I was able to speak with the studio holders Virgilio Neto, Rafaela Foz, Julio la Pagesse, Pedro Vercosa, Gabriel Pitan Garcia, Renarta Neon about the space and their own practices. BREU is a space for young artists, like the founders, to try experiments with their practice. As a non-funded space they are constantly trying to find ways for it to pay for itself beyond their studio rent, with the money enabling the exhibitions. As Renarta said, “money never happens! Only 14 galleries in São Paulo get state funding and there are hundreds of creative spaces and organisations in the city”. However, this does not make it a negative city to produce art in, rather it is a close-knit network and they all support each other. “In São Paulo there’s a big circulation of people and money, things need to happen, you need to make your city”, said Virgilio, continuing, “the Bienal is very important to the scene and giving it a world profile but the people of São Paulo are used to high profile events so art is nothing special to them, it becomes a bit every day”. BREU are creating a fairly unique space in São Paulo as it is multifunctional and supports a wide network of young artists as well as working with the local University and other educators who run workshops and classes on site. BREU has a shop at the front, that they’re testing out at the moment with vintage clothes and small art works for sale, the main gallery space which mostly has seen film and sound exhibited within it, and at the back a space for workshops and talks. The gallery is long with equal square footage upstairs which houses the artists’ studios and an open air kitchen – a theme in the art spaces of Brazil, and the place most people will congregate during an event in the space. Another unique outlook BREU have on the art scene is, as Julio said, “crazy, why do artists make work? No one ever asks you to make anything, but we do”. This sense of privilege the artists have that they are able to make work and have it seen, as well as help other artists work be seen is central to what they do, they are a platform and safe place, BREU is an important live space for early career artists in a very bustling and creative city.
One of the highlights of the trip for me was meeting with Mariana Sesma, Advisor for International Affairs and Flavia Abbud, Institutional Relationships and Partnerships Manager for the São Paulo Bienal. Both Mariana and Flavia gave us a lot of their time and insight into the Bienal as well as private tour of the Bienal venue at the initial stages of install for this year’s incarnation curated by Gabirel Perez-Barreiro. They explained how São Paulo was an ‘intense’ city for contemporary culture and it is important to them the Bienal contribute to the scene with a free programme of events and educational programme, and this is what makes them different to other biennials, or Documenta or Munster Skulpture. Founded in 1951 by an Italian industrialist the Bienal was created to mimic Venice Biennale and by 1962 was the first biennial to be curatorially-led rather than internationally-led with country specific pavilions. It has always been innovating the international cultural landscape and it endeavours to continue to do so. The amazing Bienal exhibition space is a huge building, aircraft carrier in scale and designed by Brazilian modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer, as Mariana said, “The building is an industrial space, it was never meant for human scale”. Some of the most memorable/difficult pieces of work the building has housed for the Bienal include a swimming pool, real life vultures, the building became a single large cage…the list went on. With the Bienal and building being able to continually push boundaries and host large scale contemporary art interventions and experiments it is no wonder that almost 1 million people attended the 2016 Bienal exhibition, and within this 1 million includes a large amount of local people, as Flavia commented, “the event is expected by local people, they don’t always go to galleries, but they always come to the Bienal”.
END NOTE
These two trips have been an incredible opportunity to engage with new artists and organisations across the globe and find new/continued ways of working in collaboration.
In between these two trips I read Curating Subjects, edited by Paul O’Neil and many of the essays have linked into the conversations I have been having, some of my legacy ideas to this funding and what my role is in re-telling the stories I’ve heard and I would like to pull out some quote and specific thoughts. Particularly Soren Andreasen and Lars Bang Larsen’s essay ‘The Middleman: Beginning to Talk About Mediation’, and the role of the curator, “The transformation from use value to exchange value involved a deliberate action and ‘a someone.’”[6] For example, it is my role now, after this funding, to transform the value of these encounters and exchanging of cultural conversations into an action that others can engage with. How can I translate “these social sites [of] discursive formations [and] function as models or forums for participation”?[7]
As this stage of funding comes to a close I am looking at the next steps and my role within it, as Carlos Busualdo says, “the curator’s ability to produce a highly differentiated form of knowledge is related to the degree of fidelity that ties her to the ensemble of unique situations around which s/he develops her practice.”[8] It is the role of the curator, thus me, to share the knowledge gained during these trips to benefit the publics and artists, and this is my endeavour with the SqW:Lab collaboration and the still developing ideas that have come out of the Brazil trip.
This research project felt more collaborative the further the time went on with many, if not all, of the artists talking about the same themes of space/place, politics, process and the future, and having a continued thirst to explore and understand these themes for themselves, their audiences and communities. The more I began to understand the local landscapes and why the artists and institutions were working as they were, I began to understand and explore more my own agenda and interests as a curator, and what it means to be a independent curator in London; “Work happens through the slippages between collective outputs and individual projects, between authorship and incorporated identities, and at times obscure patterns of communication, every situation begins with an invitation. Associations outside our locality are often a means of working locally. Although this might sound contradictory, it acknowledges that the ‘local’ is played out through strong, ongoing connections to other places.”[9] However, I want to be aware not to produce “‘new’ miracles in the discovery of new happening scenes.”[10] It is important to not fictionalise/exoticise/romanticise the ideas and thoughts that have been talked about over this trip, I need to remain a critic and look at how my role as curator can enhance, protect and explore.
I went on these research trips as an independent curator and the results will be led so, however it is a continued collaborative process with partners found along the way, “If dependence is about the relationship one has with others, then so is independence, independence must be a collaborative project”.[11] This trip has been made successful by the sum of its many parts, with a huge thank you to the funders, artist Tash Kahn who came along on both trips with me and my hosts Vishwa Shroff and Gustavo Ferro, it is now my responsibility to translate the experiences had and make them a worthwhile continuation and formal representation of what has happened.
I only hoped for the quality of outcomes and outputs resulting from this research project and am excited about what will happen over the next few years as a direct result of this Artist International Development Funding and look forward to challenging what these outcomes could be: “Rather than assessing projects according to current parameters around curating, perhaps we can declare different lines of inquiry, analysis, and ways of organising (temporally, spatially, socially, institutionally) as fundamentally available. And without subsuming entire practices into a ‘new relational’, we can seriously consider a range of entry points, including unofficial, informal, personal, incidental and radical inputs that happen along the way.”[12]
[1] Theatre of Exhibitions, Jens Hoffman, 2015, P.83
[2] ibid. p. 66
[3] Ways of Curating, Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2014, p. 57
[4] Theatre of Exhibitions, Jens Hoffman, 2015, p. 79
[5] Ways of Curating, Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2014, p. 20
[6] Curating Subjects, edited by Paul O’Neil, 2011, p. 24
[7] ibid., p. 38
[8] ibid., p. 49
[9] ibid., p. 161
[10] ibid., p. 181
[11] ibid., p. 55
[12] ibid., p. 173
I have always been interested in how people and ideas connect; I am especially interested in in/visible links. As a curator I like noticing similarities in approaches and themes, or similar visual cues and inspirations in creative practices and finding interesting ways to showcase them. In line with Jens Hoffman’s thinking I believe “curatorial operations and modes of enquiry come closer to the field of anthropology than to that of art history”.[1]
This approach to my practice began in Birmingham, UK, prior to and mostly when I ran a gallery called TROVE in a two-blue plaque heritage site, 2009 – 2014. The gallery, sited in the Jewellery Quarter, was where George Elkington invented metal plating and where Parkesine plastic (now known as celluloid) was also invented by employee Alexander Parkes. After the Elkington & Co metal plating factory closed down, the site became home to Birmingham’s Science and Industry Museum before the collection was relocated in 2001 to Millennium Point to make up the Thinktank Museum.
TROVE was founded in the former Engine Room of the Museum, the only part of the Museum not to be knocked down as it was listed. This incredible history directed the programming of the gallery with exhibitions linking back to the site’s heritage. I’ve continued this thinking through devising annual programmes throughout the Borough of Camden that respond to a theme relevant to the location/time (Camden 50), curating exhibitions at other Birmingham heritage sites (Thrift Radiates Happiness), and curating online projects as a way to bring creative communities together over a single theme (Cornered Stories), working site responsively has always been a factor in my curatorial approach and I have continued to work in this way of responding to site and local communities.
TRAVEL BURSARY
“Globalisation has probably had the most impact on the art world in recent decades.”[2]
In January 2018 I was awarded a British Council and Arts Council England Artist International Development Fund grant to visit Mumbai, India and Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil.
In 2016 I curated a cultural programme in Camden, entitled Camden Sentido, which celebrated the links between the London borough and Brazil to coincide with the Rio de Janeiro Para/Olympic Games and the 2016 São Paulo Biennale. As part of this programme I launched a new international strand to the London Borough of Camden’s annual arts programme and invited Brazilian artists and galleries over to the UK to be part of the conversation. One artist in particular, Gustavo Ferro, and I continued the conversation beyond the programme and he became my host artist in Brazil.
Last year, 2017, I initiated the Camden Kala programme and introduced the programme manager to several artists and galleries in India to coincide with the British Council initiative, the UK:India Year of Culture. Mumbai-based artist Vishwa Shroff spent 3 months in residency at Swiss Cottage Gallery. An artist I have worked with before at TROVE and on several other projects, Vishwa became my Mumbai host for the Artist International Development Fund grant.
Both Gustavo and Vishwa offered to introduce me to several artists and cultural organisations in Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and to see where the collaborations and exchanges could continue, with a hope to offer UK artists a return visit to these partner cities.
MUMBAI, INDIA
A whirlwind week in April 2018 in Mumbai, I spent 24/7 with UK artist Tash Kahn and Mumbai host artist, Vishwa Shroff. This week was incredibly inspirational, with ideas popping up around every corner. As Hans Ulrich Obrist says: “Conversations…are obviously archival, but they are also a form of creating fertile soil for future projects.”[3] These conversations in India were definitely just that, with several new projects and opportunities being developed as a result of this short time in India, discussed later in this essay.
Whilst in Mumbai I visited Chemould Contemporary Art Gallery, Project 88, Mumbai Art Room, Chaterjee & Lal, Shaki, TARQ, The Guild and WAA Studios. Either through these gallery visits, studio visits or through a salon day at Shroff’s home I interviewed fourteen artists/curators/creatives.
I am fortunate that this was my fourth trip to Mumbai, however, this was a first with an agenda to meet and record conversations about exchange and people’s practices, specifically focusing in on place and space. I have invited my travel partner, artist Tash Kahn, host, artist Vishwa Shroff, and TARQ gallery director, Hena Kapadia to write an essay responding to these themes and to evolve some of the topics we talked about together, namely how site specificity and walking can influence their practice, and the importance of experiencing, and being seen in, an international context.
Whilst in Mumbai I was very interested in the linear quality of research within several of the artists practice, dividing conversations had into three topics: politics/mythologies, architecture/place, and collecting/anthropology.
Politics/Mythology
Shakuntala Kulkarni’s exhibition, Julus and Other Stories had an ambition to bring people together, like poetry and theatre, with a mix of objects/bits of costume displayed via traditional museum tropes, large drawings and film. Using a traditional craft output, woven jewellery/armour/costumes, set alongside delicate drawings in small and large scale of the female figure and a film of female warriors wearing the armour, this exhibition was an examination of the links between political marches and cultural processions and gatherings. It was an exhibition about blurring the lines between beauty and function, with Shakuntala Kulkarni exclaiming in response to a question about her ‘masculine’ appearance in her film work Julus and the marching within it as a male action, “I have the freedom to march how I want. I am neither male nor female”.
I first encountered Subrat Kumar Behera’s work at 2014’s Kochi Biennale. It was a room of drawings/watercolour paintings that read like a comic strip round the gallery wall, and it was a pleasure to meet the artist this visit and have him talk through his latest work, Hell of a paradise, a take on the heaven/hell divide as imagined by Subrat. This piece of work is “purposefully not political, rather proverbial and mythological”. Subrat takes traditional and non-traditional stories and mixes them together with his own, a collection of memories from various resources including films, encounters, family stories, story books and so on. Although the artist says this work is not political, it definitely leans towards a political commentary, with ‘God’ being a round table of people who represent parts of a ‘godly power’, these people including Albert Einstein, Gandhi, Stephen Hawking, Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler: “Indian Gods are both creators and destroyers, it’s important that the ‘God’ in this painting represents both.” Subrat is an interesting character who holds onto many stories and tales in his mind, and then brings them straight to the canvas, manipulating them to create new narratives and updated mythologies.
Vijay Shekon succinctly described himself as a “site specific and process-inspired artist”. Having lived, worked and studied in New York for several years he returned back to Mumbai in 2009 to a city he did and didn’t recognise. Since then his work, a mix of drawings and performances, looking at the political and social influences upon every day life in Mumbai. “I ripped up or burnt all of my New York work, I didn’t bring it back with me, I felt like I needed a new start”, and so he began to re-examine Mumbai with a slight outsider eye working on a drawing a day upon his return, “it was a great way to get back into the city, I only managed 62 days but it really helped get back into the rhythm of the city and my role as an artist in Bombay”. His work ranges from performances that look at the very political subject matter of Mumbai residents right to water (and that fact that not everyone in Mumbai can access water), through to beautiful paintings on paper of everyday life in his neighbourhood, whilst always looking at his place and role within his local community.
Architecture/Place
Sameer Kulavoor gave me a private tour of his third solo exhibition at TARQ, A Man of the Crowd. This exhibition was a series of paintings and sculptures that reflected on everyday life in Mumbai, focusing on snippets of life he had seen, all brought together to form abstract scenes in a non-descript metropolis focusing on the people and their actions. His chosen viewpoint is one of an observer, looking down upon a concrete square filled with people from all walks of life, not involved in each other’s routine, rather alone in their actions, and brought together in this imagined place. Sameer said, “the people are old memories from all over the world, but the place is always a Bombay”. He went on, “I am used to watching constant change in Bombay, especially politically and in public spaces. These people [in my paintings] are always moving, changing spaces, and I watch them, purposefully, so I can observe how they change a place or what changes they have upon it. I want to notice”.
A chance encounter with artist Amshu Chukki on a boat ride to Alibaug allowed an insight into his approach, which very much mimicked the conversations between Tash, Vishwa and myself during my visit, “you can walk the same route everyday and you will always spot something new”. Amshu’s work looks at the complex way Mumbai is constructed, “Bombay isn’t defined areas, they all link together, a city ever moving into one another”. This is something several of the artists I met commented on, the fact that Mumbai is always shifting shape, purpose, and how that impacts upon the people who live, visit and work there. Amshu works mostly site responsively, something I am very interested in, and we discussed the question, what happens to site specific works after it leaves the site? And has the original site changed as a result?
Ceramicist Sukhdev Rathod writes down every idea he has, lists and lists of them, with works only coming to fruition when an opportunity links to a specific idea and place. His most recent work is a beautiful set of ceramic circles, each imprinted with a different rock of where he spends most of his evenings: “We can’t get wifi in the house, so most nights we walk to the beach, sit on these rocks and check our emails using the nearby café’s wifi.” This site-specific work reflects Sukhdev’s instant surroundings, something that links with his list making, often ideas being fleeting for the moments he finds himself in. He is a natural collector, translating moods or moments into creative project ideas.
I have worked with Pratap Morey before on Cornered Stories, an ongoing online project I am working on with my host Vishwa. This meeting with Pratap, however, was the first time I got to visit his studio in North Bombay and see his new work that is directly inspired by his involvement in Cornered Stories. “I moved from Bombay to Baroda and back to Bombay, and with each move I got to look at the cities in different ways. I liked dissecting buildings and developments, I started creating portraits of places through abstractly putting myself within them using just parts of my body.” His view of the city is like ‘Tetris,’ his drawings, digital and 3D collages represent the moving building blocks of a city, layer upon layer of buildings moved to sit within each other, and within available spaces. Pratap’s practice is slow and steady, but also furious at times, mimicking the city and how it gets constructed, which is also seen in a series of ‘glitch’ works – how buildings get quickly fixed and repaired which creates a glitch to the original building, something he began to notice whilst in residency in Korea where this did not happen.
Teja Gavanka is an artist with a very linear practice with one piece of work inspiring the next, her line drawings, sculptural manipulation of spaces and interventions are all part of a bigger vision, to look at “mind spaces and inside spaces while working with line and the plane of real spaces”. Teja’s work was wonderful, smart, and subtle, she specifically noted that some of her public realm work should go ‘unnoticed’ however loves when the exchange between a building and her intervention is acknowledge, but she doesn’t reply on that for the pieces to work. Teja is one of several artists we met who look at space and the city in such a unique way that I left looking at Bombay in a different way, “Bombay is a vertical city, it encourages you to look up”.
My final studio visit of the whole trip was with my host, Vishwa Shroff. I have worked with, commissioned, curated and been inspired by Vishwa since I hosted her for a residency at TROVE in 2012. Rather than host the studio visit my travelling partner, artist Tash Kahn, led the conversation and it was amazing to re-look through new eyes many of Vishwa’s latest works. Tash was specifically drawn to Vishwa’s window works, which have popped up in several projects. Having spent several years in Tokyo, Japan, Vishwa noticed how windows were used as additional storage spaces rather than as things to open/let light in. So whilst walking round Tokyo she noted what the various objects were that the windows housed from laundry to kitchen utensils, and this is where her imagination started, “who lives there? What are they doing? What do these objects tell me about them?” and from there she created a wonderful project, Postulating Premises, with her husband and collaborator Katsushi Goto, which let her delve into this questions and imagine the answers. Vishwa’s practice is drawing based and inspired by the places she sees, passes through or lives within.
Collecting/Anthropology
In my host Vishwa’s home was an incredible paper relief of a deconstructed bird. The detail and anthropological nature reminded me of the Natural History Museum, and the drawers of bird specimens. Later when I met the artist, Nisha Sikander, I was amazed to learn she gets her inspiration from her Grandfather who is a famous naturalist, and her cousin, ‘The Birdman of India’, Salim Ali, a famous ornithologist. Nisha says, “I grew up in a tropical environment with lots of naturalists, I subconsciously was attracted to birds and insects I think, there were always books and research lying around, and I often had to be quiet as a child to not scare away the birds. We would sit for hours and just listen for them”. She currently only creates these paper reliefs out of birds and moths local to her home, those she grew up with. Her technique is beautifully delicate layers and layers of paper cut to closely resemble feathers/wings combined to become whole animals, directly inspired from taxidermy and museum collections. Her whole animals are now being deconstructed to show elements of each animal, and now she also shows the negative paper sheets, each layer of deconstruction making the viewer more aware of the delicate process these works go through, “I don’t want the works to lose their awe of making, I want audiences to know the work behind them”.
Graphic designer, Kruti Saraiya, is an incredible sketchbook keeper and translator of words and places, “I started making sketch books as I wasn’t confident in my drawing skills at first, and the books were private spaces for collages and ways to keep an alternative diary of my holidays”. It was such a pleasure to be able to leaf through her many sketchbooks, and see her ongoing postcard exchange project with Vishwa. This personal practice of Kruti’s, and her love of words, “their roots, especially of foreign languages, I will always design words in a way that helps me understand them and then learn them as a result”, has made its way into her professional practice. When designing the logo for the BDL Museum in Mumbai she made sure she considered, “how do you introduce a museum to people who don’t access culture? The logo needs to speak to these people and those familiar with the museum, so I elevated the coat of arms to be the primary image with the English text being the secondary part”. As a result, her work now looks at interesting entry points to language, “it’s not about learning in a textbook way, I want to create gateways through what you’re interested in”, and always through her unique style and approach, and always originating from a sketchbook drawing.
TARQ is a 4-year-old commercial gallery in Mumbai that is already breaking the mould. Director, Hena Kapadia, has grown TARQ organically and works from the premise that “parties aren't important, socialising is”. And this ethos is seen in the artists she works with and how the gallery is a welcoming space for conversation and experimentation, and not just a place to be seen. Having studied Art World Practice at Christies, Hena says that she actually learnt how to run a successful and innovative gallery though doing, “I wanted to shake up the art scene in Bombay, it felt dead, I wanted to switch the light on”, and that she did. Returning recently, when I met with her, from a sold out show at Art Basel Hong Kong she is taking the world by storm and definitely shaking things up, with traditional Indian collectors wanting to buy traditional Indian artists, she is teaching old and new buyers new ways of looking and investing, “oil on canvas is no longer valuable, I am re-educating buyers that it’s not all oil and sculpture, it’s watercolour, photography, paper, collage. It’s moving on, they have to, too.”
Shivaji Gaekwad is a specialist working for Sotheby’s India and allowed us a great insight into the Indian collecting scene, and how there are three types of collector, the private collectors, the ‘taste maker’ collectors and the speculators. “There are only six people or less in India who collect Western art”, Shivaji told us, while comparing the pre and post 2009 crash art worlds, “but collectors want to invest in Indian artists who have a Western reputation for exhibitions”. The Sotheby’s art world is a very different one to TARQ, with Sotheby’s being about long standing buyers and auctions rather than the personal touch of TARQ, but Sotheby’s is not without its edge, with Shivaji telling us about an auction a few years ago of fake Indian artworks, “the scene is littered with fake art works, it’s Sotheby’s job to only sell artworks but also to authenticate”. He also told us, in line with Hena, that post the 2009 crash buyers stay with the artists they know, new galleries, such as TARQ, have to create new/their own buyers as the old circle does not adapt to change.
A visit to WAA Residency and Studio space allowed an insight into the North Bombay art scene, which is very different to the South Bombay set where I was staying. WAA’s administrator, Rashi, took us for a tour of the various studio and residency spaces, allowing us a chance meeting with curator Gitanjali Dang who has an office in the complex, and the studios of Gayatsi Kodikal and Ratna Gupta. WAA is open to all proposals and they were hosting their first musician on our visit, “it’s important WAA doesn’t just host artists, we proactively want to host curators, musicians and people developing creative projects”. The project space there is always active, with film nights and pop-up weekend long exhibitions, the highlight of the year, we were informed, is the January Open Studios, this is the moment the local community really comes together and people travel to WAA to see what’s going on. “We don’t curate our selected residents, but we do think more about what the studios might be doing in January for the Open Studio’s event, we want people to be bringing in something different and exciting, and usually try to work with international people at this point, too.”
RIO DE JANEIRO AND SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL
This June 2018 trip was my first ever to Brazil and I was very excited about the experience after having heard so much about it and the scene from the artists I had worked with in 2016. Sadly my host, Gustavo Ferro, was unable to be in Brazil at the time of my trip due to unforeseen circumstances. Although I was sad he would not be there for the visit I was pleased to have Tash Kahn, artist and DOLPH Gallery Director, accompany me again.
As Tash and I were left to our devices more on this trip, rather than staying with our host and having them with us all the time, I felt more of a cultural tourist than in Mumbai. This had the impact of feeling more explorative where we happened upon culture and conversation a little more. However, saying that Gustavo had introduced me to several artists and galleries that I had then arranged visits with, so although he was not present he had a huge impact on people I spoke with.
I have since commissioned Tash to write another article as she has seen both places with me but from an artist perspective, as well as my host Gustavo Ferro and UK based artist, Flora Parrott, who has partaken in many residencies in Brazil and it is integral to her artistic practice. These articles are about place and how changing perspectives or re-looking at a city can impact how you move around it.
Whilst in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo I was interested to learn more about the recent history of the country and its current political standing. I enjoyed discovering the social responsibility many of the artists felt and how most of their work reflected local history, politics and responses to local audiences.
As with Mumbai I did not allow myself enough time in both Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, however, the time there was incredibly fruitful. It was an incredible opportunity to see the places and have conversations with people my host, Gustavo, had previously spoken to passionately about. Like Mumbai these two Brazilian cities sat heavily on the artists I spoke with and were incredibly influential to everyone’s practice. I was able to speak with six artists and three galleries/ateliers in Rio de Janeiro and eight artists, two curators, two galleries and the Bienal in São Paulo.
Whilst in Brazil I was inspired by the diversity of artistic styles but the similarities in how everyone was responding to the current political landscape in Brazil, as result I have broken up my conversations into Communities/Built Environment, Politics/History and Dream Big.
Communities/Built Environment
I was fortunate to have a long conversation with Paul Heritage, Founder and Director of People’s Palace, an organisation that played a large part in the British Council’s cultural Olympic projects in London, 2012 and Rio de Janeiro, 2016. With projects that saw Brazilian artists create bespoke performances that took place in people’s homes in East London, in partnership with Battersea Arts Centre, through to initiating and continuing choirs made up of residents of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. It was incredibly interesting to hear how Paul started the organisation, in partnership with Queen Mary University, and continued to expand with thanks to some strategic fundraising and income generating work. Paul was very helpful in giving me an overview of Rio de Janeiro’s set up and how communities exist together in a very mixed and creative city and was very open with how they continue to realise their programmes and how you can have a successful career in brokering and realising projects with innovative international cultural relationships.
Daniel Murgel is a Rio de Janeiro based artist who runs Atelie Sanitario along with Leandro Barboza and Guga Ferraz. Daniel spoke the most fluent English so was our main point of contact at this space and whilst talking through their practice, in particular his and Leandro’s creative collaboration. They are working in a non-defined partnership looking at self constructed architecture and restoration, specifically how buildings get fixed or changed for purpose in an ad hoc way – something that was very apparent when walking around Rio de Janeiro, an up-cycling of buildings with a ‘make do and mend’ attitude. Daniel’s admiration for classical painters leaks into their work and they use domestic colours within their installations that he calls ‘think paintings’. Everything in their studio was part of these constructed think paintings, from the colour tests on the walls, to the small piles of dust, to the built sculptures made from found objects to Leandro’s day job, his architectural restoration work. The work that most caught my imagination whilst there was their newly built pizza oven on the roof of the atelier, a motif/object they want to build in communities and art spaces all over the world. Its sculptural appeal and functional one is what interests the artists, it’s about constructing with communities own creative infrastructures and creating spaces to ‘break bread’ and talk with one another.
Thelma Vilas Boas is an artist and local activist who whose primary focus is working in a local bar, Bar Delas, and serving the community that use it. She says it’s about taking care of people, and encouraging them to take care of each other outside of the bar setting, with the bar being more than just somewhere to come for a drink, it’s also an ‘activating space’ – a place where the community can come together and take part in creative activities whilst enjoying the traditional notion of what a ‘bar’ is. Vilas Boas’ art practice started out as film and photography production, however she has evolved and her work is now this social enterprise, the pub is owned by two women with her at the forefront of the activity programming. Her attitudes towards the local community are amazing, citing that some of the young people she works with, their parents call the pub their church. The bar is becoming an international beacon for Brazilian women taking charge with their onsite workshops covering everything from creating protest signs to debate the current political climate all through way through to discussing every day women’s rights.
Bruno de Almeida is a curator of two very interesting concepts/spaces in São Paulo, SITU and 1:1, with both exploring the links between art, architecture, city and community. Bruno works primarily with Latin American artists to create site-specific works. For SITU, the artists work with the external spaces of the Galeria Leme building with temporary and site-specific works, which relate both to the building and to the adjoining public space, while 1:1 is found on the top floor of Galeria Jaqueline Martins and out in the public realm near the gallery. Both of these programmes are unique and very inspiring. Bruno is a curator on the up, and is to be a de Appel student this year. He says of his approach, “by chaining a disparate series of artistic ideas that speak directly with the public space, my projects intend to continuously engage a broader and more heterogeneous audience, inviting them to think critically about the city and the processes that shape it”. Bruno wants to take the work directly into the community as well as keeping it within the gallery setting, smartly working with various audiences and levels of engagement and blurring the lines between institutional and every day criticism.
Bruno’s artist at 1:1 is currently João Loureiro who gave us a tour of his work in the gallery and also his local intervention in a supermarket around the corner from the space. João is primarily a sculptor who questions the everyday and the relationship between form and function and our habitual behaviours towards things. João’s work at 1:1 was incredible, a comment on Brazilian approaches to art, exchange, and the city, with a replica made from polystyrene with dead flies on of Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) which was exchanged in the 70’s with the UK for a Henry Moore’s Two-Piece Reclining Figure: Points (1969-70), which João has made in miniature in raw meat and displayed at the local supermarket’s meat counter. These two pieces speaking to each other across the Central district of São Paulo, with flies being released weekly that have been ‘hatched’ on old Moore meat replicas (as these get renewed every week so they keep fresh in the supermarket.) João spoke in length about his other work and Tash and I were very inspired by his approach of thinking laterally and stretching ideas to where you would not expect them to go.
Politics/History
Guga Ferraz is an urban artist who creates interventions into Rio de Janeiro’s landscape. Most often his work is politically charged and examines issues of urban violence and how individuals navigate/own the city and how you can make a city feel like a ‘place’. This political backbone to his work is something apparent in many conversations had with all artists on this trip. With the location of his studio being a few buildings down from a huge burial ground of 50,000 black slaves brought to Brazil by the Portuguese 500 years ago really grounds his work in the conversation about who owns the space, who built the space and how do the people of Brazil continue to grow, own and build upon it to create their own future and a better history.
There is a strong female art presence in Brazil with many of the women artists I spoke to also being strong political activists, another of these was Rio de Janeiro based artist Paula Dykstra. Paula spoke about her dislike of the term ‘artist’ as it denotes a form of betting on people in an economical sense. Her work focuses on looking at the divided art world, those who make work for money and those that don’t, she is the latter, however she works for a leading female collector in Brazil so sees both sides. She believes that self organising is the only way to get your voice heard and create real change in your communities and across the world with her work questioning, what is the power of an island? A question she said was as relevant for Brazilians as Tash and I as UK residents.
A trip to Atelie397 in São Paulo made for a wonderful meeting with artist and curator, Flora Leite. She has curated the current exhibition, Que Barra, in the space and walked us around it as well as gave us a look at her own practice. Flora’s work is site specific in nature and heavily politicised. Always looking for the ‘odd spaces’ in buildings to use or looking at historical stories to re-tell she wants to examine meaning and material, “materialisation – what is matter’s (political) meaning?” Her latest work, a firework recreation of the Southern Cross star constellation embodies several of her artistic themes, including astrology, looking at the power of real vs. fake, discovery and ownership – the stars were named by someone, they did not name themselves. The latter point being something she, as a Brazilian artist, examines a lot in her work specifically how Brazil as a country came into being and the colonising of it by the Portuguese. And this political edge to her work is seen in the exhibition at Atelie397 with the artists responding to or being selected for their resonance with May 1968, and the 50th anniversary of a huge Brazilian political crisis. In 1968, Flora tells us, there was a huge preoccupation to look at LGBT culture, race, feminism, and questions about freedom. Brazil was the place to experiment types of freedoms and how this needs to happen again, and many of these conversations are starting up again in today’s world political climate. Flora says, “my daily life, when I am making, do I feel most free. But there’s no such thing as absolute freedom”.
Dream Big
On a visit to BREU space in São Paulo and I was able to speak with the studio holders Virgilio Neto, Rafaela Foz, Julio la Pagesse, Pedro Vercosa, Gabriel Pitan Garcia, Renarta Neon about the space and their own practices. BREU is a space for young artists, like the founders, to try experiments with their practice. As a non-funded space they are constantly trying to find ways for it to pay for itself beyond their studio rent, with the money enabling the exhibitions. As Renarta said, “money never happens! Only 14 galleries in São Paulo get state funding and there are hundreds of creative spaces and organisations in the city”. However, this does not make it a negative city to produce art in, rather it is a close-knit network and they all support each other. “In São Paulo there’s a big circulation of people and money, things need to happen, you need to make your city”, said Virgilio, continuing, “the Bienal is very important to the scene and giving it a world profile but the people of São Paulo are used to high profile events so art is nothing special to them, it becomes a bit every day”. BREU are creating a fairly unique space in São Paulo as it is multifunctional and supports a wide network of young artists as well as working with the local University and other educators who run workshops and classes on site. BREU has a shop at the front, that they’re testing out at the moment with vintage clothes and small art works for sale, the main gallery space which mostly has seen film and sound exhibited within it, and at the back a space for workshops and talks. The gallery is long with equal square footage upstairs which houses the artists’ studios and an open air kitchen – a theme in the art spaces of Brazil, and the place most people will congregate during an event in the space. Another unique outlook BREU have on the art scene is, as Julio said, “crazy, why do artists make work? No one ever asks you to make anything, but we do”. This sense of privilege the artists have that they are able to make work and have it seen, as well as help other artists work be seen is central to what they do, they are a platform and safe place, BREU is an important live space for early career artists in a very bustling and creative city.
One of the highlights of the trip for me was meeting with Mariana Sesma, Advisor for International Affairs and Flavia Abbud, Institutional Relationships and Partnerships Manager for the São Paulo Bienal. Both Mariana and Flavia gave us a lot of their time and insight into the Bienal as well as private tour of the Bienal venue at the initial stages of install for this year’s incarnation curated by Gabirel Perez-Barreiro. They explained how São Paulo was an ‘intense’ city for contemporary culture and it is important to them the Bienal contribute to the scene with a free programme of events and educational programme, and this is what makes them different to other biennials, or Documenta or Munster Skulpture. Founded in 1951 by an Italian industrialist the Bienal was created to mimic Venice Biennale and by 1962 was the first biennial to be curatorially-led rather than internationally-led with country specific pavilions. It has always been innovating the international cultural landscape and it endeavours to continue to do so. The amazing Bienal exhibition space is a huge building, aircraft carrier in scale and designed by Brazilian modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer, as Mariana said, “The building is an industrial space, it was never meant for human scale”. Some of the most memorable/difficult pieces of work the building has housed for the Bienal include a swimming pool, real life vultures, the building became a single large cage…the list went on. With the Bienal and building being able to continually push boundaries and host large scale contemporary art interventions and experiments it is no wonder that almost 1 million people attended the 2016 Bienal exhibition, and within this 1 million includes a large amount of local people, as Flavia commented, “the event is expected by local people, they don’t always go to galleries, but they always come to the Bienal”.
END NOTE
These two trips have been an incredible opportunity to engage with new artists and organisations across the globe and find new/continued ways of working in collaboration.
In between these two trips I read Curating Subjects, edited by Paul O’Neil and many of the essays have linked into the conversations I have been having, some of my legacy ideas to this funding and what my role is in re-telling the stories I’ve heard and I would like to pull out some quote and specific thoughts. Particularly Soren Andreasen and Lars Bang Larsen’s essay ‘The Middleman: Beginning to Talk About Mediation’, and the role of the curator, “The transformation from use value to exchange value involved a deliberate action and ‘a someone.’”[6] For example, it is my role now, after this funding, to transform the value of these encounters and exchanging of cultural conversations into an action that others can engage with. How can I translate “these social sites [of] discursive formations [and] function as models or forums for participation”?[7]
As this stage of funding comes to a close I am looking at the next steps and my role within it, as Carlos Busualdo says, “the curator’s ability to produce a highly differentiated form of knowledge is related to the degree of fidelity that ties her to the ensemble of unique situations around which s/he develops her practice.”[8] It is the role of the curator, thus me, to share the knowledge gained during these trips to benefit the publics and artists, and this is my endeavour with the SqW:Lab collaboration and the still developing ideas that have come out of the Brazil trip.
This research project felt more collaborative the further the time went on with many, if not all, of the artists talking about the same themes of space/place, politics, process and the future, and having a continued thirst to explore and understand these themes for themselves, their audiences and communities. The more I began to understand the local landscapes and why the artists and institutions were working as they were, I began to understand and explore more my own agenda and interests as a curator, and what it means to be a independent curator in London; “Work happens through the slippages between collective outputs and individual projects, between authorship and incorporated identities, and at times obscure patterns of communication, every situation begins with an invitation. Associations outside our locality are often a means of working locally. Although this might sound contradictory, it acknowledges that the ‘local’ is played out through strong, ongoing connections to other places.”[9] However, I want to be aware not to produce “‘new’ miracles in the discovery of new happening scenes.”[10] It is important to not fictionalise/exoticise/romanticise the ideas and thoughts that have been talked about over this trip, I need to remain a critic and look at how my role as curator can enhance, protect and explore.
I went on these research trips as an independent curator and the results will be led so, however it is a continued collaborative process with partners found along the way, “If dependence is about the relationship one has with others, then so is independence, independence must be a collaborative project”.[11] This trip has been made successful by the sum of its many parts, with a huge thank you to the funders, artist Tash Kahn who came along on both trips with me and my hosts Vishwa Shroff and Gustavo Ferro, it is now my responsibility to translate the experiences had and make them a worthwhile continuation and formal representation of what has happened.
I only hoped for the quality of outcomes and outputs resulting from this research project and am excited about what will happen over the next few years as a direct result of this Artist International Development Funding and look forward to challenging what these outcomes could be: “Rather than assessing projects according to current parameters around curating, perhaps we can declare different lines of inquiry, analysis, and ways of organising (temporally, spatially, socially, institutionally) as fundamentally available. And without subsuming entire practices into a ‘new relational’, we can seriously consider a range of entry points, including unofficial, informal, personal, incidental and radical inputs that happen along the way.”[12]
[1] Theatre of Exhibitions, Jens Hoffman, 2015, P.83
[2] ibid. p. 66
[3] Ways of Curating, Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2014, p. 57
[4] Theatre of Exhibitions, Jens Hoffman, 2015, p. 79
[5] Ways of Curating, Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2014, p. 20
[6] Curating Subjects, edited by Paul O’Neil, 2011, p. 24
[7] ibid., p. 38
[8] ibid., p. 49
[9] ibid., p. 161
[10] ibid., p. 181
[11] ibid., p. 55
[12] ibid., p. 173
