Brazil Contemporary - Contemporary art, architecture and visual culture

Three Rotterdam museums are bringing the rich culture of Brazil to the city on the Maas. Brazil Contemporary – Contemporary art, architecture and visual culture presents every facet of Brazilian culture in three exhibitions, a publication, and a programme of activities. Brazil is inspiring, astounding, amazing. It is one of the largest countries in the world, with vast cities of millions of inhabitants that defy the imagination. Brazil is an exciting cocktail of high and low art, of street art and politically committed art, and of different art disciplines and traditional craftsmanship.

Location Netherlands Architecture Institute The Netherlands Architecture Institute introduces the public to one of the biggest cities in the world: São Paulo. With its melting pot of cultures and identities, São Paulo is the reflection of contemporary Brazil. The exhibition introduces visitors to the mind-boggling size, the social structures and the cohesive forces of this metropolis. There are three intertwining narrative threads. First is the story of a vast city with millions of inhabitants.

Location Netherlands Photo Museum The Netherlands Photo Museum zooms in on the rapidly changing Brazilian visual culture with its mixture of high and low, élitist and populist, artistic and applied. The exhibition shows not only photography, but also other old and new media, television and internet, with an excursus on fashion and design.

Brazil Rotterdam But that is not all. In conjunction with Rotterdam Festivals, the Rotterdam summer will be a more sultry one with Brazilian jazz, films, street art and a special edition of the Summer Carnival.

The work of Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980) is the starting point for an exhibition of Brazilian art at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. The exhibition questions to what extent contemporary Brazilian artists are influenced by Oiticica and how this manifests itself. The exhibition includes works by Hélio Oiticica, Ernesto Neto, Rivane Neuenschwander, Cao Guimaraes and Ricardo Basbaum.

Cannibalism The exhibition’s central theme is ‘anthropophagy’ (cannibalism). The Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade published his Manifesto Antropófago in 1928, stating that Brazil’s history of ‘cannibalising’ other cultures was its greatest strength. The visual artist Hélio Oiticica rediscovered the term and used it to describe the appropriation of foreign influences. The word cannibal is a variant of Carib, the name of a West Indian people reputed to have eaten the flesh of their enemies in order to absorb their power. Andrade and Oiticica used the term in a metaphorical sense. They made it clear that Brazil must not passively imitate Western art forms but must selectively rework them to create a unique, specifically Brazilian culture. In Oiticica’s word anthropophagy is ‘our defence against foreign rule and the most important creative weapon.’ According to Oiticica the Brazilian identity was largely determined by its ability to absorb other identities: ‘We are blacks, Indians, whites all at the same time.’ Oiticica wished to get away from art as an elite fetish object. He sought ways to involve the complex totality of Brazilian cultural reality within art and thus to reach a broader audience. He actively sought connections with popular culture. ‘It all began with my experience of samba, wit the discovery of the hills, the organic architecture of the favelas in Rio and, above all, the spontaneous anonymous constructions in the large urban centres: the art of the street, of incomplete things, of the wasteland.’ Oiticica’s influence cannot be overestimated. This is clear from the fact that Brazil’s cultural development over the last few decades is best understood as a continuous attempt to absorb Western influences without losing its Brazilian character. Indeed Brazil has used these various influences to create a unique form of culture.

Modernism Over the last fifty year Brazil has sought its own path between the First World and the Third World. The country has had conservative, populist leaders such as Kubitschek, but also a left-wing president in Goulart. Brazil was governed by a right-wing military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985 and has also had an ultra-liberal president in Collor de Mello. And now there is the polder model of president Lula da Silva. The country has witnessed a similar diversity culturally. Since the 1950s Brazil has developed its own form of Modernism. This has been influenced by European Modernism of the 1920s, but developed later in its own context and so has manifested itself quite differently. This is true of the visual arts, architecture, music, cinema, theatre, dance and design. The specificity of Brazilian culture is characterised by mixture: high and low culture, street art and politically engaged art, the conceptual and the sensory, various disciplines and traditional crafts, all set against a backdrop of tropicalism and overwhelming urbanism. Today’s Brazilian artists remain true to Oiticica’s mentality.

Brazil Contemporary
Contemporary art, architecture and visual culture

Künstler: Hélio Oiticica, Ernesto Neto, Rivane Neuenschwander, Cao Guimaraes, Ricardo Basbaum ...