In this fourteenth edition of PIPA Prize, there is a total of 73 Participating Artists – of which 61 were nominated for the first time – chosen by the Nominating Committee. As the last two editions, the Prize is focused on a more recent production, being directed to artists who had their first solo or group exhibition no longer than 15 years ago. The Prize’s goal is to be a boost for artists at the beginning of their careers who develop distinguished works.
An important moment of every edition takes place with the creation of pages for each Participating Artist on the Prize’s websites (in English and in Portuguese): all artists participating have their own page, with images of works, texts, videos, information about the trajectory, among other contents. These pages that are being created now, added to the existing ones, constitute a source for research on Brazilian contemporary art, and can be later updated with the submission of more material by the artists, thus always being up to date with the new moments of each one’s production.
In addition to this content, the pages also have a videointerview offered by PIPA and carried out by the Do Rio Filmes production company, a format that allows the artists to present their work to the public in a closer and more personal way. These videos will soon be available and will be announced on the Prize’s platforms.
In this post, we present bellow recently created pages of some of the PIPA 2023 Participating Artists:
Bárbara Macedo is a visual artist, researcher and art teacher; she is a transvestite and makumbeira. Holds a Bachelor’s degree of Visual Arts from Escola Guignard – UEMG. Investigates the crossroads between art, transvestite and makumba. She has participated in several solo and group exhibitions, including: “Babélica” (2023), “Museu Travesti da Neca” (2021), “BRAsA” (2019) and “Coleção Grandes Mestres das Nudes” (2018).
She worked as the curator and coordinator of the Fourth Queer Artistic Residency (2018) and as the curator of the exhibition “Trajetória Viva” (2020). Sees spirituality not only as an investigative theme, but also as a field of collective creation between the artist and the dead with whom she lives daily. Is interested in unlocking colonial traps and creatively using her good and bad moods. She is an artist from the crossroads, a place where she creates images and spells in the quest to emancipate a transvestite art. She nurtures herself with enchanted knowledge brought by the dead in the terreiro that she is part of, composed mostly of transvestites, including its caretaker-of-saint; locating as her epistemic reference the one that is based on the makumbas, on her own body and on the corporeities of other transvestites that she has been photographing for eleven years.
Visit the artist’s page here.
I was born, grew up and live in Jardim Catarina, a huge neighborhood in the municipality of São Gonçalo, Rio de Janeiro. I was raised by Black women who introduced me to the world of arts based on their daily experiences. As a continuation of this education, I graduated in Communication with an emphasis in Journalism, and I specialized in Afrikan Literatures, directing my gaze to Angola. The main intention of my artistic processes is to reflect and register my existence based on space, subjectivity, and corporeality. I turn clay into a material and philosophical starting point through mediums such as sculpture, painting, poetry, photography, and audiovisual.
The movements generated from these fabrications have led me to travel inside and outside of Brazil, participating in group exhibitions, among which the highlights are “Hu – minha alegria atravessou o mar” at MAC Niterói, “Crônicas Cariocas” and “Um Defeito de cor” at Museu de Arte do Rio, “Vazar o Invisível” at OM. Art, “Nunca foi sorte” at Central Galeria, in São Paulo, the ”Mostra a tua arte” project, in Belém do Pará; the solo exhibition “do barro ao corpo” at Sesc São Gonçalo; the artistic residence in Taipei Artist Village, Taiwan; critical texts such as ”art as a means to claim existence and permanence” for Select Magazine, ”chronicles of a celebration of the sea” for Taiwan East Coast Land Arts Festival; participation in panels at Bienal do Livro, ArtSampa, FLUP and Universidad de La Plata; and activities related to art education in public schools. Body, territory and memory intertwine in a suggestion of individual and collective transformation.
Visit the artist’s page here.
In her artistic practice, Larissa de Souza uses painting in different formats and languages. The central figure of her artistic representations is the image of the Afro-Brazilian woman in her private and collective universe, navigating between memory, body, desire and ancestry. In her production, the elements that stand out are collages of objects, fabrics, embroidery, resin frames, techniques with textures on painting, paintings with an abstract background and iconographies developed by the artist. Larissa is self-taught and her work is part of important collections, such as the Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR) and the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). Among group exhibitions and national and international art fairs, she held her first solo exhibition at HOA Tour Gallery, “Pertencimento’’ (2021 – São Paulo, Brazil), and her first international solo show at Albertz Benda Gallery, “Paredes que Contam Histórias’’ (2023 – New York, USA).
Visit the artist’s page here.
Marcelo Camara holds a Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts from the Universidade de Brasília (UnB, Brazil) and a degree in Architecture and Urbanism from the same institution. He works with painting and drawing, investigating the relationship between action and representation, between the figure and the gesture, using reference images – mainly from the history of art – from which his works depart. The works result from looking at canonical images, in a revisitation that ends up undoing what is known. His process is intimately linked to the desire provoked by what he sees and the possibilities of the gesture, leading to a kind of abstraction where the traces, stains and colors suggest rather than define figures or scenes, in an opening of the image that makes one reflect on the ideia of representation itself and about the language of painting. The artist participated in group exhibitions, such as “Do corpo objeto ao animal político”, Arte Londrina 8, UEL/PR (2020), “Entre o tempo e o espaço”, at Galeria Casa/DF (2022), “Sob a luz azul”, A Pilastra/DF (2022), Brazil. He had his first solo exhibition “Variações” at Espaço Cultural Renato Russo in Brasília/DF, in 2022, which was presented in the same year at the Centro Cultural Octo Marques in Goiânia/GO, Brazil.
Visit the artist’s page here.
Ricardo Tokugawa was born in São Paulo, is a grandson of immigrants from Okinawa (islands south of Japan) and has in his path a mixture of three cultures: Brazilian, Okinawan and Japanese. He has a degree in Engineering and Photography and his artistic work contemplates the search for a personal confrontation, a look at his ancestry and a process of investigation of the family and the house. In his work, he proposes that through recognitions and estrangements we can look at our own identity issues and traditions, which do not cease to move and renew. As a result of this research, in 2021 he published his first photobook, “Utaki”, by the Brazilian publisher Lovely House.
He has held group exhibitions in Brazil and France, and among the awards received are the Best Edition Award | FELIFA Festival, Argentina (2021) and the Lovely Award | Imaginaria Festival, Brazil (2021). In 2020, he was one of the photographers participating in “Arte na Fotografia” TV show of “Arte1” Brazilian broadcast, and in 2022 he participated together with Magnum Photos Paris agency in the European Union program in photographic legacy management and provided assistance to the photographer Gueorgui Pinkhassov, member of the same agency.
Visit the artist’s page here.
Keep an eye on PIPA Prize’s website and social media to check out each week new pages of the Participating Artists and to soon watch their videointerviews.