Adriano Pedrosa and Rodrigo Moura – The research regarding the artists has been happening throughout the past several years. Many of the foreign and Brazilian artists are professionals we have worked with before. The sets and subsets of works were chosen based on knowledge and reflection on these works, but, above all, considering Brazilian perspectives. Thus, the section artevida (body), at Casa França-Brasil, has clusters of Brazilian and foreign works based on Bicho, Linha orgânica (both by Lygia Clark), on Tecelar (by Lygia Clark), on Parangolé (by Hélio Oiticica), generating close relationships that revisit the orthodox geometric abstraction, suggesting an organic and body-conscious form of thinking about the object and emphasizing the body as an activator of the artistic experience. On the other hand, in the section artevida (politics), thematic clusters are related to dictatorship regimes, war, violence, elections, censorship, demonstrations, work, feminism, racism, and seek this parallel between contexts which apparently are not connected, but that bear some kind of relationship with the Brazilian people.

IB – How do the works chosen relate to hegemonic narratives in contemporary art?

AP and RM – The exhibit looks towards the Brazilian production as a matrix and filter, so as to consider broader, more global relationships between different artistic contexts. We have prioritized this dialog with production hubs which are somehow closer to us, either because they share with us a colonial and post-colonial history, or recent history of authoritarian regimes, or, simply, because they are far from hegemonic production centers. There is a desire to untie an affiliation model that always goes through the center so that production can be legitimized. This doesn’t mean we deny our relationship with Eastern Europe and the United States at all.Actually, there are some artists from these regions present in the exhibit. What we propose are new dialogs, which have not yet taken place. If, in the first part, which we opened at Casa França-Brasil last month, this dialog happens by way of the body, whether through geometry or self-portraits, in the section that opens next Saturday at MAM Rio, this dialog happens through politics. This doesn’t mean an evolution in time, but rather a difference, a modulation of the curatorial framework.

RM – It seems to me, this dialog happens in a very important way. As we mention in artevida’s curatorial statement, this is not an exhibit of a thesis, but of many hypotheses. This polyphonic representation is something I learned working in the formation of the collection, when this happens all the time. The artists you’ve mentioned have a very important place at Inhotim, precisely because they found such fertile soil when it comes to dialogs with Brazilian artists, they are central to building a narrative of what Inhotim represents as art: Lygia Pape, Cildo Meireles and Hélio Oiticica, for instance, are represented with such important works in our collection. At Inhotim, we’ve recently delved into areas we just knew superficially before, such as Western Europe and Japan, which have not yet been completely revealed, but that start to appear in exhibits at the Institute. This is the case of the individual exhibit by Romanian artist Geta Bratescu, at Galeria Lago as of September, and Do Objeto ao Mundo – Coleção Inhotim, at Palácio das Artes in December and at Itáu Cultural next year. In these exhibits, we are going to show quite a lot of Japanese material that have great resonance with the art produced in Brazil in the same period.

Interested? Then plan to visit artevida!The exhibit will be open until September 21, 2014.