13 BRAZILIAN PHOTOGRAPHERS
21 June – 18 July 2013
Brazilian photography is experiencing an extremely positive period with great liveliness in areas of thought, production and exchange of images. In the past decades, Brazil has witnessed continuous growth of photography universities, galleries dedicated exclusively to this form of art, festivals spread in various cities of the country, book releases, important fairs which stimulate the economy of photography and, finally, the exchange of the photographic art and its producers with other countries.
Brazilian photographers have produced works with enormous artistic and documentary value and have been granted prizes in Brazil and abroad. They go beyond the use of paper and take advantage of alternative techniques and surfaces that are accessible to them. They feel free to, for example, use chemicals to destroy a film or overlay various images creating an urban landscape that they have in their minds (and not the one seen by the camera).
The exhibition 13 Brazilian Photographers will present a part of this production. For the first time Slovenia hosts an exhibition dedicated exclusively to Brazilian photography. These 13 photographers with diverse approaches and intentions will come together to present their individual series in a group exhibition.
Claudia Jaguaribe’s photographs of children on the foreground in the slums of Rio de Janeiro are echoed in the aerial photography of Cássio Vasconcellos, where we see from above, distanced, life in miniature that unfolds on a sandy beach. Characters living in a region abundant with water, portrayed by Luiz Braga, are put in dialogue with the desert environment ofJoão Castilho’s fantastic narrative. Photographer Penna Prearo shows us the lightness of the fabric ballerina dancing in the wind, while Letícia Ranzani draws us into the darkness of fear and the phenomenon of persecution that is common in big cities.Gui Mohallem places himself in the midst of the celebration, which takes place between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. His images are connected to Eustáquio Neves’s work about the religious rituals and syncretism of the remaining communities of quilombos. With the intervention of chemicals on photographic films, Davilym Dourado destroys the time and takes us to the nineteenth century era which inspires the fabric portraits by Luisa Malzoni, matched with the delicacy of Gustavo Lacerda’s albinos series’ bright colours.
In addition to the photographs, the exhibition will also present two video projections of the collective Cia de Foto: in Rain, we are presented with the problem of flooding of the city of São Paulo and in March we watch workers on their way to work. Lastly, Alícia Peres presents her documentary Girls, which closely follows the intimate moments in the life of homosexual couple Juliana and Priscilla.
Photographers:
Luiz Braga (1956) had his first contact with photography when he was 11 years old. He graduated in Architecture in 1983 but he never worked as an architect. He mainly photographed in black and white until 1981 when he discovered vibrant colours of popular Amazon images from which he selects his pictures of boats, parks and popular bars, which mix natural and various artificial sources of light. This exhibition presents two of his photographs – Babá Patchouli (Nanny Patchouli) and Rosa no Arraial(Rosa in the village fair).
João Castilho (1978) presents fantastic narrative of the Redemunho (Whirlwind) series of photographs which speaks about the sertão – an area in Brazil geographically associated with the desert where planting is complicated, water is scarce and life is hard. In this isolation people have learned to live in a non-palpable world. In the sertão it is believed that the “devil lives inside the whirlwind” and the photographs originate from this believes and oppositions.
In the Negative Experience series of photographs Davilym Dourado (1975) recreates images through experiments with chemical products, exposing films to acid bleaches and detergents, corroding the film, which starts to dissolve and thus creates another photograph. The apparent reality transforms into fragments of a dream, hidden in memory.
The collective Cia de Foto (2003) emerged in the city of São Paulo generating a polemic because it displaced individual credit of a photographer in favour of a collective, which underlines their productions. The collective investigates photography itself and it originates from this creative territory to approximate expressions and to question the space of images and its understanding. At this exhibition two videos are projected. Marcha (March) shows workers on their way to work in a neighbourhood of São Paulo, searching for a democratic place in the stratified society. In Chuva (Rain) the collective displays the tension of a city, which cannot support its own routine anymore because of an event that should be natural but burdens the fragility of São Paulo.
The production of Claudia Jaguaribe (1955) is characterized by an intense visual research using photography, video and internet to address issues of contemporary society. In the past seven years the artist turned to landscape photography as a reinvention of nature. The Entre Morros (Between hills) series, which is presented at this exhibition, was nominated for the Prix Pictet in photography and included in the Growth book edited by teNeues.
Gustavo Lacerda (1970) began photographing as a photojournalist when he was 20 years old and took up advertising photography later on – an area in which he has been awarded many prizes in Brazil and abroad. Since the beginning of the 1990s he has carried out various photographic researches and projects, among them the outstanding Albinos series, also presented in this exhibition, for which he won the first place at the Conrado Wessel Prize in Brazil.
Luisa Malzoni (1980) graduated in Photography in 2001 and it was at the university where her passion for the 19th century techniques was awakened. For years she worked as a laboratory technician and in 2005 she became a specialist for restoration of colour to preserve the first coloured movies of the Brazilian Cinematheque. In her Tessituras series Malzoni focuses on portraits. She photographs individuals with a digital camera using natural light, always at the same time and place. She leads the portrayed individual with questions and subjects she wants to address. She makes a digital photolit and then the complex process of her creation starts: printing of a unique, hand made objects.
Gui Mohallem (1979) presents images from his first book Welcome Home. The series, initiated in 2009 in a sanctuary in the inland USA, portrays the experience of the artist who for three consecutive years witnessed the Beltane, where around 700 people meet in a rural area to celebrate a pagan fertility ritual. In 2011, the photographs were already displayed in Brazil and in the sanctuary itself in the middle of the forest.
Photographer and video artist Eustáquio Neves (1955) graduated in Chemistry in 1980, a knowledge which has followed his long path of research and development of alternative techniques in managing negatives and photographic copies. In the Os Arturos series the artist presents a section of his ongoing project, which he had been working on for more than five years, about religious rituals and syncretism in the remaining communities of quilombos (clusters of resistance against slavery organised by fugitive slaves) in Brazil.
Alícia Peres (1983) is one of the most significant photographers of the new generation of visual artists in the city of São Paulo. At Photon she presents her video documentary Meninas (Girls). The images portray moments in the life of a homosexual couple Juliana and Priscila, records that she began collecting in 2006, and which display intimate scenes of the two girls such as the wedding ceremony, pregnancy and the birth of twins Luna and Maia.
Penna Prearo (1949) is an artist who uses photography as a representation of fantasy, dream and hallucination. He started his professional career in 1972, photographing musicians and theatre shows. This is where he gets his inspiration, which accompanies him in his journey of staged images. In the series Ballerinas he uses the allegory of “beings” made out of fabric that dance in the wind in different landscapes of Brazil.
Leticia Ranzani (1980) is a visual artist who works across wide range of media, including photography. At the Photon she presents O Começo é Sempre o Escuro (The Beginning is Always the Dark) series, a work which explores the possibilities of turning a photographic representation into an exercise for the imagination, one in which the world transforms itself into something unexpected. Its suffocating atmosphere resembles a persecution scene; however, it does not reveal the pursuer neither the pursued, but merely scenes perceived as flashes of a desperate runaway.
Cássio Vasconcellos (1965) started his photographic career in 1981 and is perceived as one of the most prominent Brazilian photographer. One of the highlights of his production is aerial photography: he photographed almost every Brazilian region from above and included these pictures in a book published in 2010. At the exhibition the artist presents Praia (Beach), a composition made of tens of photographs. The sea and the sand are taken from a desert beach in the south of Alagoas and the bathers are from Copacabana, Ipanema, Guarujá and Trancoso.
Conceptualization, Curatorship and Executive Production
Fernanda Prado Verčič
Realization
In collaboration with Photon – Centre for Contemporary Photography
Support
Cultural Department of the Ministry of External Relations of Brazil with support of the Embassy of Brazil in Ljubljana
