21ST Contemporary Art Biennial SESC_VIDEOBRASIL: Imagined Communities

Titled “Imagined Communities”, the 21st Contemporary Art Biennial SESC_VIDEOBRASIL held at Sesc 24 de Maio, in São Paulo, features 55 artists from 28 countries, comprising two collections and over 60 works of art, ranging from video and painting, to photography and installation. Artistic Director Solange Farkas, Founder and Director of Associação Cultural Videobrasil and Artistic Director of the Biennial since its inception in 1983, was assisted by a curatorial team of three to organise the rich programme including the exhibition, a public programme and publications.

The guest curators are Gabriel Bogossian, Assistant Director of Associação Cultural Videobrasil, Luisa Duarte, an art critic, independent curator and professor, and Miguel A. López, a writer, researcher, co-director and chief curator of TEOR/éTica in San José, Costa Rica, and co-founder of Bisagra, an independent venue in Lima, Peru.

Köken Ergun, Binibining Promised Land, 2010, video installation comprised of three videos and magazine covers. Installation view at 21st Contemporary Art Biennial SESC_VIDEOBRASIL: Imagined Communities, 2019-2020. Photo: Everton Ballardin / divulgação.

Dana Awartani, I Went Away and Forgot You. A While Ago I Remembered. I Remembered I’d Forgotten You. I Was Dreaming, 2017, installation comprised of sand and natural pigment, video (22min). Installation view at 21st Contemporary Art Biennial SESC_VIDEOBRASIL: Imagined Communities, 2019-2020. Photo: Everton Ballardin / divulgação.

“Imagined Communities” borrows the title from Benedict Anderson’s classic study analysing nationalism through the concept of an imagined community. Anderson depicts a nation as a socially constructed community, imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group. The Biennial takes on Anderson’s analysis to reflect on forms of social and community organisation existing beyond, on the fringes or in the breaches of nation states. Such groups include “religious or mystical communities, refugee groups uprooted from their original land, clandestine, fictional and utopian communities or those constituted in the underground worlds of bodily and sexual experiences”.

In the 21ST Contemporary Art Biennial SESC_VIDEOBRASIL “Imagined Communities” exhibition, artists from indigenous groups or original peoples from Brazil, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Peru and New Zealand deal with the issues present in the making and representation of those cultures in art and the world. There are artists like Aykan Safoĝlu and Nilbar Güreș who explore the queer/LGBT universe, while others look at racial issues or border conflicts. In addition to the main exhibition artists, there are five guest artists: Andrea Tonacci, Hrair Sarkissian, Teresa Margolles, Rosana Paulino and Thierry Oussou.

Lebanese artist and filmmaker Ahmad Ghossein collects and analyses documents and found footage. Using these elements, he exploits the potential of the moving image to investigate the connections between individual experiences, historical events and collectively shared political realities. His 2015 video work Al Marhala Al Rabiaa (The Fourth Stage) merges elements of film, magic and the changing landscape of southern Lebanon. The 37-minute film investigates the motivations and implications of the disappearance of a famous magician and ventriloquist named Chico, whom the artist helped as a child.

The pair visited villages around the country to entertain children. The video sees the sudden emergence of monumental geometric sculptures, with vertical and futuristic shapes, positioned in the outskirts of cities, or close to valleys and mountains and in public squares, unnatural presences piercing the rural and urban fabric. From two seemingly disparate realities, the two elements connect the magical universe of childhood to the ideological and religious systems conceived by political parties and by the national state.

Also from Lebanon, Omar Mismar uses a poetic approach to deal with conflict and its possibilities of representation. His recent work explores the meaning and ability of gestures in spaces of political conflict. In his video Schmitt, You and Me (2016-2017) the artist makes friends with the owner and the manager of a gun shop in Skowhegan, Maine, and asks them to read aloud excerpts from the work “The Concept of the Political” by Carl Schmitt, a controversial jurist known for his ties with the Nazi regime. With the repetitive reading of the German text on violence, power, the role of friend/enemy, “the viewer becomes aware of the potential conceptual and political pitfalls created by Schmitt’s ideas, which reverberate widely in present times”.

Turkish artist Aykan Safoğlu uses film, photography and performance to investigate issues of cultural and ethnic belonging, attempting to forge relationships between geographies, linguistic universes and different time frames. In his video Off-White Tulips (2013) he employs archive images and records of objects that are written, one by one, by the camera. The artist creates an imaginary conversation between himself and the American writer James Baldwin, who lived in Istanbul in the 1960s and 1970s, through an autobiography narrated in third person. Baldwin’s indentity as a gay black man enables Safoğlu to dig into the political dimensions of racism and tolerance, while also bringing Turkish and American icons of the time into the conversation.

Also from Turkey, filmmaker and video artist Köken Ergun focuses on the rituals existent at various social levels as creators of identity and unity. In his 2010 video installation Binibining Promised Land he looks at the 35,000-strong Filipino community in Israel, which is primarily composed of women living precariously, often working as caretakers of elderly and sick people. The community gets together in Tel Aviv to celebrate their culture, which includes holding Binibining Philippines Israel, a local version of the most important beauty pageant of their country of origin (Binibining means ‘miss’).

The installation comprises three videos. The first, main video shows an edited version of the beauty contest, while the other videos show the Filipino women talk about their lives and daily routine. The installation also features the poster of the 2009 pageant, shown in the main video, alongside a selection of covers of Filipino magazines published in Israel and living room furniture where viewers can sit down to watch the videos as if in a familiar, domestic environment.

The third Turkish and artist showing at the 21st SESC_VIDEOBRASIL, Nilbar Güreş uses photography, collage, drawing and video, with a theatrical and performative approach, creating narratives that are often humorous, with a strong critical and political tone. In her 2018 work Torn, she asks the viewer to consider the discourse of social power and how it forms peripheral communities, emphasising specific experiences of trans women in Turkey. The video portrays a trans prostitute, Didem, whose attitude on camera is suggestive of her vulnerable yet strong position. Through zooming, the artist creates intimacy between the viewer and character, and opens up Didem’s world to the audience through observation and details, such as a neck scar. The latter is a visible testimony of the threats and violence women like Didem face everyday.

Of Maori descente, New Zealand artist Brett Graham sees his Maori ancestry as a Pasifika/Moana identity affiliated with a global network of non-Western peoples. Through large-scale sculptures and installations, he explores indigenous history, politics and philosophy. His work Monument to the Property of Peace and Monument to the Property of Evil (2017) relates to the spirituality of the Pai Marire faith, a syncretic movement straddling traditional Maori religion and the strand of Christianity that emerged in New Zealand in the late 19th century and played an important role in the resistance of native peoples to the European invaders.

The two towers in the installation, clad in wood, are reminiscent of the houses of the period, and serve as reminders of the stone obelisks erected in Petane and Ōmarunui in 1916 by the veterans of the “one-day war.” The artist made the two monuments to peace and evil similar, to reflect how dichotomies often look the same, depending on one’s perspective.

Hailing from Australia, Erin Coates works with video, sculpture, design and installation, drawing on research that explores the relationships between body and space. In her video Driving to the Ends of the Earth (2016), she takes a long road trip with her dog. While driving, she munches away at food, waters the plants in the backseat and texts on her mobile phone and fondles her mutt, while it observes her human behaviour. Meanwhile, the camera shows an apocalyptic world outside through views in the rearview mirrors, showing a fictional and comical journey to an unpredictable end of the world.

Saudi artist Dana Awartani creates drawing, objects, video and installation, blending traditional elements of Islamic art, with the aim of preserving it in a world where it is slowly disappearing. I Went Away and Forgot You. A While Ago I Remembered. I Remembered I’d Forgotten You. I Was Dreaming (2017) comprises an installation and a video. The installation is a patterned floor made with sand coloured with natural dyes. The video sees Awartani seeping away a floor installation similar to the one at the biennial, located inside a house of Hejazi architecture, a style common in the city of Jeddah before its westernisation from the 1950s onwards.

South Korean artist Ellie Kyungran Heo is an artist and filmmaker. Her experimental films are collages of performance records and excerpts from documentaries, in which she pursues mutations in subject-object relationships, intimacy and conflict. In her 2015 video Island the daily life of the few local residents of an island located on the southernmost point of South Korea. The island comes alive with tourists for a few hours a day, only to fall back into silence for the remainder of the day. The film records the locals’ anguish, reflections and views on universal themes of the human condition.

Iraqi artist Hiwa K creates work that criticises the professionalisation of artistic practice and the individualisation of the artist’s figure. In his 2011 video This Lemon Tastes of Apple follows two musicians amid the protest of 17 April 2011 in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq Kurdistan, where the artist was born. The two play the motif composed by Ennio Morricone for the gunslinger duel in Sergio Leone’s movie Once Upon a Time in the West. The armed duel of the film here transforms into one between unarmed people and the tear gas bombs of police repression.

The title of the work makes reference to the lemon juice used by protesters as a detoxifying agent against tear gas, and the fruity scent of apples produced by chemical weapons used in Saddam Hussein’s genocidal attack against the Kurdish people in 1988. The video suggests that the story lingers on in the 2011 protests (in which at least 10 ten people died and 400 were injured) against a supposedly democratic Kurdish government.

Another Iraqi artist, Sadik Alfraji works with drawing, painting, animation and video installation. His 2017 video I Am the Hunter, I Am the Prey was commissioned for the Iraqi Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale. The animation plays with the hunted/hunter dialectic based on drawings inspired by textbooks, ancient myths, fairytales, Islamic manuscripts, anatomical designs, cosmologies and signs of the zodiac. The work explores the dichotomy hunter/prey, and the alternation of the two positions in human relations.

Syrian photographer Hrair Sarkissian tells stories that are invisible or inaccessible to official narratives. In his 2008 series of 14 photographs Execution Squares he captures public execution squares in three Syrian cities: Aleppo, Lattakia and Damascus. Shot early in the morning, when executions usually take place, the images reveal “a fragile paradox between the quiet, peaceful and perennial spaces, and the turbulence of the political and social realities that inhabit them—and by which they are eclipsed”. Through there photographs, the artist denounces the continuous and hidden presence of hanging bodies, while highlighting the absence of death at the present moment of the image.

Also from Syria, Maya Shurbaji is a producer, filmmaker, screenwriter and curator. In her video work Wa Akhiran Musiba (2017) she builds a personal narrative by putting together seemingly unrelated episodes. The story suggests the presence – or shadow – of a tragedy or trauma, through urban scenes, unusual shots of interior spaces, old childhood footage and text message conversations. The title of the video means “At last, a tragedy”, and it expresses just that in a poetic way, without being literal, but rather suggestive, with out of focus bodies, wars, missing interlocutors and indifferent animals.

Hailing from Hong Kong, Tang Kwok-hin brings his installation of video and collage I Call You Nancy (2012-2017),which typically explores his life through his art. Here, he takes as a starting point his mother’s decision to terminate a pregnancy. Tang creates an imagined sister and weaves together memories to create a life for the girl he never knew. The video offers a glimpse of Tang’s memories of a 25-year-old sister he never met, by drawing on a photo album and internet research.

Vietnamese artist Thanh Hoang worked in television and media outlets for more than seven years before turning to film to tell her own stories. Nikki’s Here (2018) is a cross between documentary and fiction, which follows the life of Nikki, a New York tantric masseuse who makes a living by providing ecstasy and relaxation. Thanh shows Nikki’s work moments, her personal life as a wife, and Chance, the couple’s pet that develops cancer and forces the two to reassess their life.

21ST Contemporary Art Biennial SESC_VIDEOBRASIL: Imagined Communities is on view from 10 September 2019 to 2 February 2020 at SESC 24 DE MAIO, São Paulo, Brazil.