(this page was last updated in January 2019)
The PIPA Prize Exhibition 2018 took place at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (MAM-Rio) from September 1st to October 28th and presented artworks by the four finalists of the eighth edition of PIPA Prize: Arjan Martins, avaf, Romy Pocztaruk and Vivian Caccuri. The exhibition shows a diverse work set to the public – from painting to installation, sound art to photography – composing a small sampling of the diversity of Brazilian contemporary art production.
Watch the PIPA Prize 2018 Finalists’ Exhibition making-of video:
PIPA Prize nominee for the sixth time this year, Arjan Martins has a long journey as an artist and is dedicated, mainly, to painting. For the exhibition, Arjan presents three big-scale paintings. Those are canvas that show a visual repertory and an Afro-Brazilian narrative that has been historically left aside from the main narrative. His counternarrative is told from figures and daily situations, anonymous characters, black bodies and maps which redesign the Afro Atlantic migrations’ geography at colonial times. “In a very explicit way, Arjan’s paintings highlight the colonization and slavery oppression aches – which are still so present in our daily social conflicts – but they do this with a violent exuberance of form, that doesn’t let themselves to domesticate in illustration”, declares Luis Camillo Osorio.
The made-up word that names the collaborative project founded by Eli Subdrack triggers, at least, curiosity: avaf, always written in small letters, is sometimes a collective project, sometimes an individual one, taken by Eli who, in his works, discuss matters such as gender-related ones, identity, liberty, pleasure and authorship. For the exhibition, avaf reunited different works produced between 2004 e 2018 in an installation made especially for the PIPA Prize 2018’s exhibition. “reTRANSpectiva #1″ mixes tapestry, neon, painting, masks, plants, wallpapers, a LED panel, etc, and proposes a remixing of his own work. The installation is penetrated by the transgender’s image, theme/symbol that permeates avaf’s work. The trans person becomes the central strategy in the exhibition, where the artist re-contextualizes different period works in a single place.
The idea of journey is recurrent in Romy Pocztaruk‘s production, who usually gets envolved in long investigative researches. The artist covers distant geographies to register traces from abandoned places which were, some day, faraonic projects. Romy brings the work “Bombrasil” to the exhibition, a photographic and documental investigation about the nuclear arms race unfolding in Brazil during the Cold War. The project, secretly conducted by the Military Regimen between 1960’s and 1980’s decades, used to long for the uranium enrichment technology development and construction of both atomic bomb and submarine at Brazil. That resulted in the construction of the nuclear power plants in Angra dos Reis, in Brazil, place where the artist photographed at. Alongside the photos, Romy also exhibits posters that reproduce headlines about the Brazilian atomic program after the Dictatorship’s ending.
Interested in sound exploring as a way of disorienting and amplifying perception and senses, Vivian Caccuri usually works with sound installation/sculpture. One of the works presented by the artist is “Oratório”, an installation which brings together the bass sound experience to ritual and religious cults. Before a great sound system, Vivian puts lighten up candles which are moved by bass rythms. The soundtrack that makes the flames tremble is based on one of the first written notes to a choir in occidental music history, executed by roman catholic monks.
Chosen by the PIPA Board amongst the 70 artists nominated by the Nominee Committee this year, the four finalists run for the main category of the prize which, worth R$130,000, is chosen by the 2017’s Prize Jury. They also compete for PIPA Prize Popular Vote Exhibition, which awards the artist with the highest number of votes given by the visitors during the course of the exhibition with R$24,000 – located within the exhibition area, the ballots were open until September 30th.
See some of the photos of the exhibition:
