Português
Pivô hosts Regina Parra’s solo exhibition
É Possível, Mas Não Agora exhibits artworks produced by the artist during her residency in the Pivô Pesquisa programme.
The show É Possível, Mas Não Agora occupies several exhibition spaces at Pivô, incorporating video, installation and painting by artist Regina Parra who, over recent months, has worked in dialogue with Ana Maria Maia, the exhibition’s curator. The works displayed merge the frontiers between reality and desire, inclusion and exclusion, the I and the other, stemming from the artist’s observations on migration movements.
According to the curator, “the exhibition intersperses the documental and the metaphorical, and is placed in the gap between the beginning of an ethnographic exercise (or human geography) on recent immigration to São Paulo and essays on the act of migrating, being a foreigner, and the fruits of search and desire”.
In the video São Vãos os Esforços, a human billboard ditches his usual sandwich board slogan “I buy gold” to advertise impossibilities. The painting Zona de Espera captures the idle time that is typical of places of transition and temporary shelters.
A foosball table brought from Bolivia by immigrants traverses the exhibition room wall. The installation Metegol is at the same time an invitation to meet and its own negation.
Frontier landmarks – pieces made of solid wood or concrete used to demarcate territories – gain mobility in the world of fluid limits of Política Sem Imaginação É Burocracia.
An award winner at the Fundação Joaquim Nabuco Video-Art Competition, the video 7.536 passos follows the artist on a walk from central Praça da Sé to Brás, a region in the East of São Paulo that is a frequent destination for illegal immigrants. Her journey is solely guided by the sound of a radio tuned to frequency 94.3 FM, which is an empty frequency used by pirate radio broadcasting outside state control.
According to curator and researcher Moacir dos Anjos, Regina Parra “crosses the frontiers within the city and creates – step-by-step – a geography of proximity”.
Parra’s practice is mostly cross-disciplinary, for the past fifteen years she has been working between painting, video, sculpture, writing, performance, and choreography. Her production has been increasing scale over the years, and seeking an installation dimension, towards the creation of a total environment that encouraged her to work with collaborators in other fields of creativity, such as dance, music, costume design, and cinema. What brings all those elements together is theater, her first area of activity. Before entering the visual arts, she worked for Brazilian theater director Antunes Filho as his assistant director. This experience formed a deep connection with the performing arts, especially Greek tragedy, that remains with her.
As a female artist from Brazil, where the rate of violence against women is heartbreakingly high, it is also vital for Parra to centralize a critical feminist position in her practice. Much of her work is centered on woman’s social body—as a place of affirmation and potential power. Parra’s research rests at the intersection of colonialism and capitalism and their lasting injustices and historical violence toward women.
Her work has been shown at institutions such as the Jewish Museum, in New York (USA), MACBA-Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (SPA), Mana Contemporary in Chicago (USA), Americas Society in New York (US), Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea (ITA), Centre d’Art Contemporain d’Ivry (FRA), and Museu Nacional de Lisboa (POR). Last year she held a solo exhibition at Pinacoteca de São Paulo (BRA).
Parra was awarded the 3M Public Art Award, SP-Art Fair Prize, Joaquim Nabuco Foundation’s Video Award, and Videobrasil Award; and was nominated for the Emerging Artists Award— Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation.
Her work s in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art—MACBA Barcelona; Museum of Art of Sao Paulo —MASP; Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo; Figueiredo Ferraz Institute; Joaquim Nabuco Foundation; Museum FAMA, VideoBrasil, among others.
