We’ve reached the end of the first round of PIPA Online 2019 and ten artists are classified for the second round: Agrippina R. Manhattan, Denilson Baniwa, Luiz d’Orey, Panmela Castro , Bia Leite, Yhuri Cruz, Pedro Gandra, Gê Viana, Maxwell Alexandre and Thiago Barbalho. In the second phase of the voting, the ten qualified artists run for a donation of R$15.000, given to the most voted artist until midnight of the last day of the 2nd round. It’s important to highlight that, starting now, the votes on the 1st round will be reset. The counting begins again on the 2nd round.
MEET THE CLASSIFIED ARTISTS FOR THE SECOND ROUND OF PIPA ONLINE
Agrippina R. Manhattan is an artist, researcher and transgender woman [travestite]. Born and raised in São Gonçalo, she currently lives and looks for a job in Rio de Janeiro. Her work is part of a deep concern towards everything that imposes limits to freedom – words, social norms, the hierarchy, imposed ideas. She says she feels like she doesn’t owe the current system anything and that satisfies her. She chose her own name and invented herself, as she chooses the title for a work or as she finds her voice in a poetic practice. To think of sculpture as poetry, poetry as sculpture and all of it as one.
With a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts by the Universidade de Brasília, Bia Leite focuses her studies on painting, engraving, drawing and cinema. Her collages are what guide her creative process, addressing subjects such as violence, conflict, daily life, love, questions about gender and sexuality and the strength of the TLGBQI+ family. Music shows up in her works as the soundtrack of metaphorical fictional images. It may be surprising to see her painting series including movie names, music albums, blogs and memes of Ceará’s drag queen reality show. Links between composition texts and acclaimed pop culture images.
Sometimes, the challenge isn’t occupying positions. When the positions that exist don’t serve your purpose, it’s necessary to create something new. Denison Baniwa is an indigenous artist, he is indigenous and is an artist. His indigenous being allows him to make art in a different kind of way, in which imaginary processes are forced interventions in a dynamic history (the history of the colonisation of indigenous territories we now know as Brasil) and the interpolations with those that embrace its responsibilities.
In his paintings and interventions, Luiz d’Orey investigates the processes of circulation of information and its systems in the urban and digital context. In 2016, d’Orey graduated in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he received the following prizes; 727 Award (2016), Sillas H Rhodes Award (2016) and Gilbert Stone Scholarship (2015). D’Orey worked as an assistant of the artists Carlos Vergara (Rio de Janeiro) and Raul Mourão (New York) from 2013- 2017. His works have already been in group shows in the USA, , Brazil and Europe. Amongst his solo shows are: “Recent Ruins”, at Gitler & Gallery (New York, 2018); “Espaço Comum”, at Dotart Gallery (Belo Horizonte, 2018) and “Quase plano”, at Mercedes Viegas Gallery (Rio de Janeiro, 2017). In 2018, his short film ‘Tapume’, co-produced by Hugo Faraco, was nominated for the DOC NYC Festival. His work is part of the PIPA Institute collection, Brazil.
Originally a graffiti artist from the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, Panmela Castro has always been interested in the discussion that her marginalized female body establishes in the city context. She has dedicated herself to elaborate performances based on personal experiences in search of mutual affection from those that have been through similar experiences. Panmela has a Master’s degree in Arts from the Rio de Janeiro State University (UFRJ), has developed projects in more than 15 countries, has had her work exhibited in institutions such as the Stedelijk Museum, and is in renowned art collections such as the United Nations. She has received numerous nominations for her work in human rights activism.
Pedro Gandra attended the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro. Gandra has exhibited his work in institutions and galleries since 2011, he develops his research from some references, either outlined photos, writings and notes he stored, or literature, fables in particular. In his work, he proposes to articulate those references in the field of painting. And from that, Gandra sets his own imagery and vocabulary.
To create a path in art today, it must begin with the idea of exposure, using esthetic categories. I think about the legacy left by the photographers that exposed the daily life of the great metropolis, ghettos and traditional peoples. My work is performed at the act of photographing bodies and then applying several cuts of photo-collage, then the photograph comes back as a new body and I also make wheatpastes during urban/rural intervention experiments. I’ve been in the search for a non-linear artistic expression, throwing myself over the research of the performative body and the abject bodies by the hegemonic colonizing culture and its communication and art systems, (marginalized and invisibilized bodies). From a process in Santos with Lívia Aquino, a researcher in the visual arts field, I decided to research the “poor image” and the historical photojournalistic appropriation methods, as so the majority of my works the use of other photographic layers can be seen.
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. They are large-format paintings in which the black bodies are presented in an empowered way, but also in moments of confrontation with the police, portraying a radically contemporary community routine.
“Barbalho studied philosophy and started his career as a writer, having published short stories, novels and poetry, and founded the independent press Edições Vira-lata. After experiencing what he describes as ‘a crisis in relation to the limitations of written language’, the artist embraced pictorial language as his preferred means of expression. Working primarily with drawing, Barbalho produces extremely intricate yet unplanned compositions in which a multitude of images, symbols and colour fields merge into each other to create seamless vibrating surfaces.”
by Kiki Mazzucchelli.
Through sculpture, writing, poetically-glued objects and performative propositions I’ve been investigating ways and strategies to give light and shape to what I call “underground memories”. What moves me and my practice are the marks and traces which house themselves underneath (underground too) our bodies (spiritual and physical, individual and social, political and psychological). As well as our lands, institutions, language.