Contemporary artistic production from the geopolitical south and the work of the Danish/Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson are the focal points of the 17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil, scheduled to open on September 30 in three separate cultural venues across São Paulo.
Olafur Eliason, Your body of work, 2011. Photo: Everton Ballardin
Akram Zaatari, Gregg Smith, Marcello Mercado, Sebastian Diaz Morales, Shaun Gladwell, Galina Myznikova & Sergey Provorov, Cinthia Marcelle, Eder Santos, Marcellvs L. and Tatiana Blass are among the 98 artists selected for the Southern Panoramas show, which will map the recent artistic production in Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
The exhibition Your body of work, Olafur Eliasson’s first solo exhibition in Latin America, consists of ten site-specific installations that dialogue with the city and the architecture of the Festival’s three venues: SESC Belenzinho, SESC Pompeia and Pinacoteca do Estado.
The 17th edition marks the transformation of Videobrasil, originally dedicated to video production, into the only contemporary art festival of its kind in Brazil. “Videobrasil is not opening up to all forms of artistic manifestation on a whim; the move results from a process that has accompanied a change in the role of the audiovisual languages in contemporary production”, explains the general curator Solange Farkas.
The choice of Eliasson as guest artist underscores this change. “The particularity of Eliasson is that he works with issues derived from science, from cinema, from technology in a manner that rejects any limitation in terms of language and that imposes itself as sensory experience.”
With 130 guests, including artists, curators and researchers, and exhibitions that will remain open through to January 2012, the Festival offers an intense educational program designed to discuss different aspects of southern circuit production and deepen the debate on artistic residencies and the role they play in diluting frontiers on the current scene. The 17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil is a joint production by SESC (www.sescsp.org.br) and Associação Cultural Videobrasil (www.videobrasil.org.br).
