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Exhibition
Paulo Nazareth: VUADORA
26/03 - 17/07/22
free
Wednesday to Sunday, 1 pm to 7 pm

The exhibition VUADORA will present for the first time in a Brazilian institution a great overview of the work of Paulo Nazareth, one of the most important artists of his generation.

The exhibition, curated by Fernanda Brenner and Diane Lima, include a combination of approximately 180 iconic works from the last two decades – such as the series Cadernos de África and the collection Produtos do Genocídio – and works specially commissioned for the occasion.

Curatorial Text

In 2011, Paulo Nazareth left Minas Gerais on a journey of thousands of kilometers to the United States, where he would participate in an exhibition at Art Basel Miami. Instead of “flying” to one of the most important international contemporary art events, Nazareth chose to travel by foot from what is conventionally called Latin America to reach his destination.

Described by the artist as a residence in transit – or perhaps an accidental residence – the project Notícias de América is the result of a year of intense experiences and exchanges with the people he met along the way, recorded in a broad combination of images, diaries, and found objects. In 2022, eleven years after the initial milestone of a working methodology that the artist has been adopting ever since, Pivô invites him to revisit his condition as a wanderer in the face of increasing restrictions on mobility imposed by economic, sociopolitical, and, more recently, health frontiers in the second decade of the 21st century. By traveling long distances, Nazareth investigates and exposes the social, political and affective structures of the territories he travels through.

His personal journey is also a portrait of the contradictions and deleterious effects of colonialism, racism and global capital in Latin America and Africa, where he was born and where his ancestors came from. Upon leaving his hometown, Paulo Nazareth took only five items with him: his life, his passport, a hard drive and some personal items. He reports that he lost everything but his life, his wallet and his optimism. Nazareth is a radical nomad, an artist who takes the binomial art-life to its ultimate consequences, always putting his own body and his experiences at the service of a broad discussion about ancestral injustices and, through art, makes perceptible what would then remain hidden.

By Fernanda Brenner e Diane Lima

Vuadora [flying kick] to the source, vuadora to the neck, vuadora to the back, to the forehead, to the chin and jawbone, vuadora to the top of the ear.… 

This exhibition stems from a question: how do we look back at the prolific practice of Paulo Nazareth – Arte Contemporânea/LTDA? VUADORA, 2022, Nazareth’s panoramic exhibition at Pivô, São Paulo, was, above all, an attempt to follow the rhythm and swing between bodies and words, and historical, geopolitical, and linguistic paths that have been the driving force behind the artist’s trajectory since the beginning of the 2000s, when he adopted his ancestral name, Nazareth:

 

I am Paulo. My name is Paulo Nazareth. Nazareth comes from my mother’s mother. So, Nazareth is a first name and not a surname. Nazareth Cassiano de Jesus. Born in Vale do Rio Doce, of Borum origin. To be Nazareth is to be my work. To become me. So, when I name myself Paulo Nazareth, this is also my work. I carry this ancestor. My grandmother becomes this sort of figurehead, right? This protection. This Egun that walks with me and protects me.

 

The exhibition time is spiral time that the artist has pursued throughout his wanderings in Latin America and Africa; a time that is measured and narrated via the body’s memories and performative ability, and that deliberately precludes linearity. Thus, any attempt at a chronological reading in VUADORA seemed pointless. In the exhibition, one could find Nazareth’s first and last works, but perhaps this is not what they are, perhaps they are these and other things. It could be that the first work contains the last, and vice versa. Like the artist himself, the works on view contain many others; they are made of collective matter. 

By combining emblematic works, many of them never before seen in Brazil, others that had never before left his studio in Palmital, Belo Horizonte, and a group of new works, we indeed confirmed the impossibility of resorting to linear time as a historical marker to explain Nazareth’s prolific oeuvre, or, to go further, any other contemporary artistic practice. Above all, Nazareth invites us to reconsider grammar, parameters, and cartographies. For him, to live in a state of displacement is also to refuse the ever-violent structures that circumscribe and define him as an individual, a citizen, and an artist. In his work, scenes of self-defense complexify these markers and are actualized at the same speed as the violence perpetrated by global racial capital. 

Nazareth’s visual vocabulary is deliberately fragmented, or perhaps more accurately, “in the making.” The hashtags accompanying the exhibition’s expanded subtitles are a collective effort to contribute to his broad lexicon. The series of words and images created and manipulated by the artist present us with the possibility of a future that challenges the defining narrative of Black and Indigenous existence as an “excess that always already justifies (makes just) racial violence.” By spotlighting power relations in non-prescriptive ways, Nazareth evokes histories of struggles and resistances that persist today. His works are, at the same time, a collection of facts, stories, and characters at the margins of the historical canon and a visual manifestation of the Afro-Indigenous knowledge underscoring contemporary Brazilian art. Since the beginning of his practice, the artist has been fighting erasure policies and raising awareness of the false dichotomies between what is perceived as popular and contemporary art. In this sense, by showing a rarely seen series of wood carving and handmade artifacts, VUADORA highlights the importance of one of Nazareth’s key references, Mestre Orlando—a master carranca (figurehead) sculptor and his mentor for years—in the tireless counternarratives that Nazareth has been building for the past two decades.  

VUADORA’s exhibition design reflects Nazareth’s multi-dimensional movements and fragmented thinking. Conceived as an open dialogue, its format revealed how “escape” is a constant operation performed by the artist; escape as a strategy, fleeting and precise, like the best sorcerers are capable of. His films, performances, interventions, paintings, drawings, installations, and sculptures, like landscapes of memory, seem to gain new or expand their meaning in each context in which they are displayed. 

 

VUADORA does not seek an easy way out, it does not promise or project anything, nor is it waiting for the future. VUADORA is already here, is what we already are: bodies in motion but not yet in tune. It is the game, the play, the tongue twister, and the irony of a visuality felt from an Exu-ian and semantic crossroads. Taking shape in the time of the already told and experienced, VUADORA becomes new with each visit; it traverses, it splits, and like Nazareth, it is never fully revealed. As American cultural theorist and poet Fred Moten suggests, to move through and despite what encloses us also means to move the walls out of and beyond the enclosure. 

VUADORA is both spell and riot (arruazsa). There isn’t enough space at Pivô to enclose Paulo Nazareth’s linguistic and visual arsenal. His practice overflows out of and beyond the building, the city and, we hope, the duration of the exhibition.

 

 

 

Artists
Paulo Nazareth
Born in 1977 in the city of Governador Valadares, Minas Gerais, and living as a global nomad, Paulo Nazareth's work is often the result of precise and simple gestures, which bring about broader ramifications, raising awareness to the pressing issues of immigration, racialization, globalization colonialism, and its effects in the production and consumption of art in his native Brazil and the Global South. While his work may manifest in video, photography, and found objects, his strongest medium may be cultivating relationships with people he encounters on the road — particularly those who must remain invisible due to their legal status or those who are repressed by governmental authorities. In certain aspects, Nazareth deliberately embodies the romantic ideal of the wandering artist in search of himself and universal truths, to unveil stereotyped assumptions about national identity, cultural history, and human value.   Paulo Nazareth (Governador Valadares, 1977) lives and works throughout the world.   His most recent exhibitions include Paulo Nazareth, ICA Miami, Miami (2019); Faca Cega, Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte (2018); Old Hope, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (2017), Genocide in Americas, Meyer Riegger, Berlin (2015), Journal, Institute for Contemporary Arts, London (2014), Premium Bananas, MASP, Museum of Art São Paulo (2013). Recent group exhibitions include Beyond the Black Atlantic, Kunstverein Hannover, Hannover (2020); 22nd Sydney Biennial, Sydney (2020); Our Selfie, MO Museum, Vilnius (2019); How to talk with birds, trees, fish, shells, snakes, bulls and lions, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin (2018); EXTREME. NOMADS, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (2018); The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, Prospect.4 Triennial, New Orleans (2017); Field Gate, Remai Modern, Sasktoon (2017); Soft Power. Arte Brasil, Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort (2016); Much wider than a line, SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe (2016); New Shamans/Novos Xamãs: Brazilian Artists, Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2016); Indigenous Voices, Latin American Pavilion 56th Venice Biennale, Venice (2015).
Diane Lima

Diane Lima is an independent curator, critic and researcher. She has an MD in Communication and Semiotics at PUC-SP, her work consists of experimenting with contemporary curatorial practices from a decolonial perspective. She is currently part of the curatorial team of the 3rd edition of Frestas – Trienal de Artes at SESC-SP and since 2018 she has been curating the Valongo Festival. Among her main projects, the idealization of the AfroTranscendence art-education program stands out; the curatorship between 2016 and 2017 of Itaú Cultural Diálogos Ausentes exhibition program and the participation in 2018 in the CCSP Art Critics Group. In 2019 she was co-curator of the PlusAfroT Residence and the group exhibition Lost Body – displacement as choreography, both projects that took place in Munich-Germany. Sworn in by several selections and award commissions, she is a professor at Itaú Cultural’s Specialization in Cultural Management and editorially co-curates two contemporary art publications, one by Act. and the other by French publisher Brook, both in press.

 

The exhibition VUADORA will present for the first time in a Brazilian institution a great overview of the work of Paulo Nazareth, one of the most important artists of his generation. The exhibition, curated by Fernanda Brenner and Diane Lima, will include a combination of approximately 180 iconic works from the last two decades – such as the series Cadernos de África and the collection Produtos do Genocídio – and works specially commissioned for the occasion.

In 2011, Paulo Nazareth left Minas Gerais on a journey of thousands of kilometers to the United States, where he would participate in an exhibition at Art Basel Miami. Instead of “flying” to one of the most important international contemporary art events, Nazareth chose to travel by foot from what is conventionally called Latin America to reach his destination.

Described by the artist as a residence in transit – or perhaps an accidental residence – the project Notícias de América is the result of a year of intense experiences and exchanges with the people he met along the way, recorded in a broad combination of images, diaries, and found objects. In 2022, eleven years after the initial milestone of a working methodology that the artist has been adopting ever since, Pivô invites him to revisit his condition as a wanderer in the face of increasing restrictions on mobility imposed by economic, sociopolitical, and, more recently, health frontiers in the second decade of the 21st century. By traveling long distances, Nazareth investigates and exposes the social, political and affective structures of the territories he travels through.

His personal journey is also a portrait of the contradictions and deleterious effects of colonialism, racism and global capital in Latin America and Africa, where he was born and where his ancestors came from. Upon leaving his hometown, Paulo Nazareth took only five items with him: his life, his passport, a hard drive and some personal items. He reports that he lost everything but his life, his wallet and his optimism. Nazareth is a radical nomad, an artist who takes the binomial art-life to its ultimate consequences, always putting his own body and his experiences at the service of a broad discussion about ancestral injustices and, through art, makes perceptible what would then remain hidden.

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