Anna Maria Maiolino: continuous

Dr Michael Asbury curated an exhibition at Camden Arts Centre of the artist Anna Maria Maiolino. The artist produced an installation with clay that relates to notions of difference and repetition, the idea of the first/primal gesture, ephemerality, cyclical/recycling, etc...Students integrated with the team of volunteers producing these pieces in collaboration with the artist. The seminar was literally a ‘hands on’ experience, where issues were discussed while producing the object. As one of the most significant artists working in Brazil today, Italian-born Anna Maria Maiolino, presented a new, site-specific installation and a selection of film works made over the last 30 years. Anna Maria Maiolino was born in Italy in 1942 and moved to Brazil at the age of eighteen. Studying painting in Rio de Janeiro her artistic career took shape in the 1960s and 1970s, a key period in Brazilian art when artistic experimentation clashed with a repressive political regime. Employing diverse disciplines and mediums including clay, ink, film and performance, Anna Maria Maiolino’s work retains a fundamental concern with creative and destructive processes and with identity; from the subjective to the universal. For the exhibition at Camden Arts Centre, Maiolino created an installation using several hundred kilograms of clay. Created by manually rolling and shaping the clay into hundreds of rolls or balls, the basic shapes used in ceramics, the installation refers to everyday tasks, to the individual, society and language; each piece retaining distinctive marks of its manufacture and collectively creating an imposing structure. The exhibition will also included selected films made by Maiolino over the last 30 years, including Y, (1974) and +&- (1999)

Barbarella: Cravo e Canela

Contribution article on Ernesto Neto's work as part of Ernesto Neto's exhibition catalogue

Neoconcretism and minimalism: on Ferreira Gullar’s theory of the non-object

Publisher's text about this book: This first book in the Annotating Art's Histories series revisits the period in which modernist attitudes took shape, examining the ways in which a shared history of art and ideas was experienced in different nations and cultures. Original essays by leading art historians and curators trace the dynamic interplay of cultures across the story of modern art, looking at moments of crisis and innovation in modernism's cross-cultural past. An account of colonialism and nationalism in Indian art from the 1890s to the 1920s, for example, suggests that cultural identities are constantly modifying one another in the very moment of their encounter and points to primitivism as a counter-discourse to modernism. A collision between modernism and colonialism in the design of a Bauhaus model housing project reveals the volatile conditions of European modernism in the 1930s. Discussions of the abstract painting of Norman Lewis and the collages of Romare Bearden illustrate the conflicted experiences and multiple affiliations of African American artists in the New York art world of the 1940s and 1950s. The first English translation of an influential essay in the Brazilian neoconcrete movement of the 1950s takes up concerns similar to those of North American minimalism in the 1960s. These and the other journeys into modernism's past described in Cosmopolitan Modernisms return to our contemporary moment with questions about modern art and modernity that we are only beginning to ask

Learning, Arts, and the Brain: The Dana Consortium Report on Arts and Cognition

Reports findings from multiple neuroscientific studies on the impact of arts training on the enhancement of other cognitive capacities, such as reading acquisition, sequence learning, geometrical reasoning, and memory

Some notes on the contamination and quarantine of Brazilian art

Chapter section in book following symposium at Freie University Berlin, 2013. About the book: Based on the papers presented at an international conference at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2013, the publication focuses on problems and challenges of art history’s epistemic frameworks. Following four guiding themes – narrations, venues, concepts and practice – the contributions address the aspect of mobility of aesthetic objects and their contextualisation from different analytical perspectives. The essays examine complex processes of transcultural negotiations that are set in motion by »travelling« objects, artists, ideas and institutions in order to trace and analyse historical conditions that generated specific frameworks with their respective art historical narratives and artistic production

Historiografias do Contemporâneo

Article in Portuguese from keynote address given at UNICAMP's Institute of Arts Symposium in 2016, during a visiting professorship. The article covers current research on translation theory and conceptual art in light of the latter's problematic application within Latin America

Daniel Senise, "2892": between being and nothingness, the spectator

This essay investigates a work by the artist Daniel Senise entitled "2892", which at first appears to be atypical within the oeuvre. It traces the production of compositional characteristics as well as the repetition of themes and figures within other more overtly painterly works produced at the moment of conception of "2892" arguing that there is a contextual coherence within the group as a whole. Whilst almost two decades separate the conception of "2892" and its first public showing, the essay then speculates on some interesting co-relations that exist between the site in which it was shown and the trajectory that the other painterly work concurrently took

E Agora José? Sergio Camargo e os circuitos internacionais de arte nos anos 1960

Section in Book on the 20th anniversary of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Sao Paulo. The chapter investigates the translational relations of Artist Sergio Camargo between France, the UK and Brazil

Cinthia Marcelle, Order and Process

Cinthia Marcelle’s use of space, or a certain demarcation of it, is combined in her work with a particular attention to the materiality of things. This dual engagement with space and matter offers an interesting point from which to begin an approach to her creative practice. Both elements come into play – the word ‘play’ employed here intentionally, its theatrical associations a characteristic of the dramatic settings in her work – through what might reasonably be called absurd circumstances. In her films, but also in her installations, we encounter an artist who seems ready to mock any assumed purpose in the human condition, as well as that of the institutions that seek to define or mould it. Hers is a directed derision, one aimed at particular expectations formed by ready-made discourses, whether aesthetic, ideological, or merely those of common sense. Mine is of course a particularly idiosyncratic approach, one not intended to contradict other possible interpretations that her practice clearly and actively invites. My reading of Marcelle’s work opens itself – indeed, it actively invites – discord and contradiction. Not to do so would be to deny its poetic possibilities

Historiographies of the Contemporary: Modes of Translating in and from Conceptual Art

This chapter describes what I see as problematic shift in the use of the term 'conceptualism' that has taken place since the landmark exhibition ‘Global Conceptualisms: points of origin 1950s-1980s’ held at the the Queens Museum in New York in 1999. Here translation theory is applied in order to analyse how the term ‘global conceptualism’ appears to have shifted from the original intentions of that exhibition to now serve primarily as a shorthand for implying that global contemporary art is somehow derivative of procedural characteristics that stem from Conceptual North American Art. I believe that this historical relation to conceptual art is methodologically problematic, since it was a movement widely described as having arisen from the rejection of Greenbergian formalism and its belief in medium specificity. It is therefore a denomination that is culturally, geopolitically and art historically located