From August 28 until September 13, 2020, ART-O-RAMA’s Immaterial Salon is accessible online. It counts with 42 exhibitors, galleries, publishers, as well as mountaincutters, as guest artists, to offer intangible works, either sound or textual. One of the participating artists is Ícaro Lira, nominated four times for PIPA Prize, including last year, and represented by Salle Principale gallery, Paris (France).
ART-O-RAMA, created in 2007, is the first international art fair in the South of France, and it is held in Marseille every last weekend of August.
It brings together a small and demanding selection of around thirty galleries and publishers who have come to develop specific curatorial proposals. Its intimate format and its commitment to artistic projects make it unique. Extending the traditional fair stand to a real exhibition space, the configuration of which is directly linked to the curatorial project, ART-O-RAMA pays particular attention to the works presented.
The opening weekend, in the presence of the gallery owners, is extended by an exhibition time which makes it possible to welcome a larger public of art lovers.ART-O-RAMA is produced by Fræme , a resident association of La Friche la Belle de Mai .
Ícaro Lira’s participation in the fair is a piece called Crítica Radical, which is the name of a group of activists formed in 1973 who have made a significant contribution to the reorganization of social movements in the state of Ceará, in Brazil. As explained on the exhibition’s page, Ícaro crosses paths with the Crítica Radical group during his first demonstration in Fortaleza, and since this meeting, he will not cease to follow and bear witness to their actions. The work presented is a recording, a documentary, with some extracts of interviews and archives belonging to the group Critical Radical. It was produced for the Meta-Archive: 1964-1985 exhibition in São Paulo in 2019, and it was presented at the Salle Principale gallery as part of the first solo exhibition ‘lessons from stone’ of the artist in France in 2019/2020.
Together with Lira’s piece, Immaterial Salon shares a bit about the artist’s production:
Ícaro Lira has developed a work that measures the implications and developments of political and historical episodes inside Brazilian history through archaeological and fictional lenses. To Lira, history is a living matter-constantly crushed by the weight of official narratives, written by the most powerful. In search of counter-narratives, the artist collects objects, texts, images and fragments of places in social conflict.
You can view and listen to Ícaro’s Crítica Radical here.