For more than ten years promoting Brazilian art and artists, and also stimulating the national production of Contemporary Art, the PIPA Institute is pleased to announce the five Selected Artists for the PIPA Prize 2021 – who are this year’s awardees. We emphasize that in this 12th edition we present changes in the Prize’s format, as we have chosen to look at the production of artists with more recent trajectories. The participating artists of PIPA 2021 are artists whose first exhibition took place no longer than 10 years ago.
The five Selected Artists show how plural Brazilian artistic production is, mixing heterogeneous languages and knowledge being developed across the country. Now, we invite you to meet the five Selected Artists listed below, who are the 2021’s awarded ones chosen by the Board, and to read more details about the PIPA Prize 2021:
Artist, writer, and psychologist, holds a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology from PUC-SP. She lives the transmutation as an inevitable determination. She circumvents, incorporates, and dives into her Bantu ontology. She takes healing as a perishable moment of freedom. She studies and builds interspecific spirituality and ancestry.
Vitorino was born in Espírito Santo in 1996, but nowadays she says that she “lives and works in Planet Earth”. The artist is also a PIPA 2019 nominee, when she was nominated for the first time.
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 he 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.
Baniwa was born in Amazonas and currently lives in Rio de Janeiro. The 37-year-old artist is also a PIPA 2019 nominee, edition in which he was the winner of PIPA Online.
Ilê Sartuzi is an artist who holds a bachelor’s degree from Universidade de São Paulo (USP). His research involves sculptural objects, mapped video projections, installations, and theatrical plays addressing issues related to the idealized image of the body, often fragmented or constructed from different parts; but also the absence of this figure in proto-architectural and digital spaces. The interest in performing arts in recent years has given a kind of theatricality to his objects and installations that are animated by mechanical movements and perform dramaturgy and choreographies.
Sartuzi was born in the state of São Paulo, where he lives and works. The 25-year-old artist was nominated for the first time this year.
Do we really know who we are? How many times do we look in the mirror and identify our ancestral features there? Some people create an image that does not represent them, but that is accepted by society, or sometimes they simply prefer to break the mirror and not face themselves. This mirror was often broken by photographer Marcela Bonfim, a 38-year-old from the city of Jaú, São Paulo state, today recognized as a black woman and resident of the city of Porto Velho, Rondônia, for 11 years.
This year’s edition was Bonfim’s first PIPA Prize nomination.
Daughter of the mysterious entrails of mother Bahia, Ventura Profana prophesies multiplication and abundant black, indigenous, and travesty life. Indoctrinated in Baptist temples, she is a missionary pastor, evangelist singer, writer, composer, and visual artist, whose practice is rooted in researching the implications and methodologies of Deuteronomism in Brazil and abroad, through the spread of neo-Pentecostal churches. Praises, like the sting of a dagger, licked with wax and rust in Pharisees’ hearts.
Profana, who’s 28, was born in Salvador, Bahia, and nowadays lives in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. She was nominated for the first time in 2020.
Read below what changed in PIPA 2021 and how the Selected Artists’ Exhibition/Take Over will be:
- After 11 years of awarding better-known artists from the national art circuit, we decided that the nominated artists in 2021 should have a career no longer than 10 years;
- This year, instead of having a single winner, we have five. The five Selected Artists, chosen by the Board, will each receive a donation of R$10.000 so that all of them are equally supported;
- The Selected Artists’ Exhibition will take place on the virtual space. Between September 13th and October 16th, the five of them will do a virtual take over with exclusive content on the Prize’s websites and social media, and on the Preview platform (of which the critic and curator Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro is one of the founders);
- The Selected Artists will not be asked to donate an artwork to the Institute.
- The five awarded artists will be given a special space on the PIPA 2021 catalogue, with exclusive critical texts.
The changes in PIPA 2021 match our goal to contemplate more artists on the Prize’s trajectory, as well as, through occasional acquisitions, to make our collection more diverse and pluralistic. We want to distribute the PIPA Institute’s resources in a broader way through acquisitions, commissioning and other projects involving especially artists that have participated in any edition of PIPA Prize.
PIPA Online 2021 maintains a similar format to the previous years, and this edition’s 64 participating artists, including the five awarded Selected Artists, Castiel Vitorino, Denilson Baniwa, Ilê Sartuzi, Marcela Bonfim, and Ventura Profana, are invited to participate. PIPA Online, which begins on August 15th, represents an important tool for the artists to further promote their work, specially to those artists who are outside of the main urban centers, and in a moment that in-person exhibitions reach a smaller public. A donation of R$5.000 will be made to each of the two most voted artists at the end of PIPA Online’s second round of voting. Besides that, the 64 artists will participate in the bilingual catalogue that will be released still in 2021.
To know more about the Selected Artists and the other PIPA Prize 2021 participants, visit their pages which include artworks images, interviews, cvs and much more. And you can also visit PIPA Institute’s website to get to know our collection.
Finally, we invite all of you to visit the Four Winners of PIPA 2020 Exhibition at Paço Imperial, starting on September 9th, with Gê Viana, Maxwell Alexandre, Randolpho Lamonier, and Renata Felinto.