Felipe Abdala

(this page was last updated in August 2023)

São João de Meriti, Brazil, 1987
Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil

PIPA Prize 2023 nominee

Felipe Abdala is a visual artist and researcher. He has a degree in Art History from UERJ (2015) and a Master in Arts from the same institution (2023). His practice starts from drawing to think the artistic gesture as a mark and a way to denounce and affirm its existence, expanding the limits of the medium to other possibilities.

Currently, he focuses on the idea of phagia in artistic making: the ways of eating, the alimentary process, the grabbing, the biting, and everything is placed around this universe. However, Abdala seeks a certain kind of phagia that goes against its most common meaning, related to the action of ingesting, of putting matter into a body or space. Beyond this, the artist proposes a phagic act that takes place outside the body, that attaches, assimilates, and takes for itself that which was immediately before understood as the outside. In this way, his artistic process has brought together the mouth, a mechanism that frequently assumes such a role, with other body structures of defense and/or attack, such as claws, nails, tails, horns, tongues, fangs, and beaks.

Website: cargocollective.com/felipeabdala
instagram.com/abdalafelipe

Video produced by Do Rio Filmes exclusively for PIPA 2023: