“Closer to PIPA: the artist speaks in the Institute collection” with Berna Reale

Berna Reale is the second guest of this new Institute and PIPA Prize project, “Closer to PIPA: the artist speaks in the Institute collection”. Every fifteen days we select an art piece that was acquired by the Institute and ask the artist to talk a little bit about the work: be it the creative process; the ideia behind the piece; how it connects with the artist’s production; or any other aspect the person would like to share. The goal is to bring the audience closer to the artist’s universe and to the “Displacement” collection by PIPA Institute, which was established in 2010 to support, help document and promote the development of Brazilian Contemporary Art, and which has the Prize as one of its initiatives.

Berna studied Visual Arts at Universidade Federal do Pará and has participated in many solo and collective exhibitions in Brazil and in other countries, as well as in biennales. The artist works with installations and performances and her main focus has been, in recent years, problems concerning power relationships and their potential to engender violence. In 2010, Reale became a criminal expert at the Center for Scientific Expertise in the State of Pará, living close to many diverse issues of crime and social conflicts. The artist was a PIPA 2013 and 2019 finalist, winner of PIPA Online 2012 and nominated for PIPA 2014.

The work we chose for “Closer to PIPA” is “Todos olham para os gatos #1”, 2019, photograph, 100 cm x 150 cm. In the image we can see the character named BI, created by Berna to represent a body that doesn’t fit in the norms, thus celebrating diversity. Check out bellow the reflection Berna sent us and then the photograph:

“‘Todos Olham Para os Gatos’ is a piece that talks about prejudice, gender violence and norms. The title refers to the fact that one of the most viewed and shared images in the internet is a cats one, and many people refuse to see the violence suffered by those who do not fit into the socials norms. It is an ironic work about not looking at the other, not seeing our neighbor, our own species. The problem isn’t looking at cats, what is grave is not looking at the humans that suffer prejudice”.

To know more about the PIPA Institute collection, visit the Institute’s website here.

Clicking here you can read a conversation from 2019 between Berna and Luiz Camillo Osorio, PIPA Institute’s curator, when the artist was one of PIPA Prize 2019’s finalists.

And, if you’d like to know more about BI, visit here the Youtube channel dedicated to the character.

Check out details of the artwork bellow (click on the images to expand):