Watch more video interviews with artists nominated to the 2019 PIPA Prize, produced by Do Rio Filmes and published this week. In them, you can learn about the works, career, inspirations and much more about Marilá Dardot, Marina Camargo, Maxwell Alexandre, Pedro França, Pedro Varela and Rafael Alonso
Click on the artists’ names to see their updated pages
Marilá Dardot is a Master in Visual Arts by the Universidad Federal do Rio de Janeiro (2003). She works with different mediums, like videos, photographs, engravings, sculptures, paintings, actions, installations and site-specific. Language and literature are her main sources of constant inspiration. Some of her projects propose public participation and collaborations with other artists.
Marina Camargo was born in Maceió, Alagoas, and lived in Porto Alegre for her whole life. She studied Visual Arts at the Instituto de Artes (UFRGS, Porto Alegre), where she also concluded a Master’s degree in Visual Arts in 2007 (with an emphasis in visual poetics); She studied Visual Culture in the Universitat de Barcelona (Fine Arts Department). She received the DAAD scholarship for artists when she went to study in Germany, later receiving the Diploma of the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (AdBK) in Munich.
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1990, Maxwell Alexandre graduated in Design from PUC-RJ in 2016 and, in 2009, participated in the ‘Curso de Fotografia para registros das Obras do PAC’ (Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento) making photographic records of the Rio de Janeiro favelas. The artist’s urban poetics consists in the construction of narratives and scenes structured from his daily experiences in the city and in Rocinha, the community where he lives and works. On different supports like doors and iron frames emerge anonymous personages in recurrent situations in the favelas.
Artist and member of the Ueinzz Theatre Company. Attended courses at the School of Visual Arts of Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil between 1998 and 2005. Completed his Master’s Degree in History at PUC-Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2010. Between 2006 and 2011, he taught History of Art at the School of Visual Arts of Parque Lage. He currently teaches at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo (MAM-SP) and at Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Brazil. In 2010, he worked as a film, performances and debates curator of ‘Terreiros” during the 29th São Paulo Biennial. In 2011 he was the curator, together with Fernando Cocchiarale, of the exhibition “Cavalos de Tróia”, part of the “Caos e Efeito” show at Itaú Cultural. Since 2011, França has been working with drawings, collages, films and installations.
The cities Pedro Varela draws are far more connected to literature than to any reference in the visual arts. As if waiting for a text by Borges to accompany them, they reserve large blank spaces on the paper. They could also be mirages seen from afar by a character of A Thousand and One Nights, cities with female names like those by Italo Calvino, or castles from a tale we keep from the infancy of our experience in literature.
He has a BFA in Painting and is currently pursuing a PhD in Visual Languages at the School of Fine Arts of UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In his works, he proposes negotiations between his daily life and his artistic practice – investigates the possibilities of articulation between day-to-day experience and painting. Alonso experience fields of action for colour, shape and gesture at the same time in which he does not remove the painting from his critical model of reflecting on his time and place.