Videobrasil’s new venue Galpão VB hosts the Southern Panoramas | Commissioned Projects show of the 19th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil. The exhibit is the result of an unprecedented call for project submissions designed to support the production of young artists from the global South.
Since 1983, the Festival has been bridging gaps in the art world and encouraging experimentation. As video art emerged in Brazil, it became the first event devoted to the genre and helped establish it in the country. Later it came to embrace all art languages and shift its focus towards the global South, a geopolitical territory whose art and culture production needs stimulus, promotion, and circulation. The commissioning of projects reaffirms Videobrasil’s vocation to find and leverage the artistic propositions deemed relevant to this symbolic region.
The choice of launching Galpão VB by exhibiting commissioned projects is aligned with Associação Cultural Videobrasil’s goal of pulling together various art languages and building new connections between the current production and its collection. A venue for exhibitions, experimentation, reflection, encounters, and research, it puts the Videobrasil Collection, amassed over the course of 32 years, in touch with the public, making it available to new critical interpretations and confirming its relevance in our days. The collection comprises artworks featured in the Festival and donated by artists; seminal video art pieces; recorded performances; statements; documentaries; and documents, amounting to close to 10,000 items (4,500 of them available for consultation). In the 850sqm warehouse, which includes a gallery, a video room, a reading room, and a garden with an open-air arena, visitors are allowed access to a Video Library dedicated to the visual arts and PLATFORM:VB, as well as services like a café and a bookstore specializing in art.
Artworks by Carlos Monroy (Colombia), Cristiano Lenhardt (Brazil), Keli-Safia Maksud (Kenya) and Ting-Ting Cheng (Taiwan) were selected, and their production was overseen by the 19th Festival’s curators: Bernardo José de Souza (Brazil), Bitu Cassundé (Brazil), João Laia (Portugal), Júlia Rebouças (Brazil), and chief curator Solange Farkas, the director of Associação Cultural Videobrasil. According to the curators, the projects “underscore the nuances, gaps and biased perceptions that constitute the plurality of gazes we cast upon the world.”