(this page was last updated in July 2016)
PIPA Nominee 2010
Member of PIPA Nominating Committee 2012 and 2016
Lenora de Barros graduated in Linguistics from Universidade de São Paulo (USP) and started her artistic career in the 1970s, a time of intense experimentalism in brazilian art, marked by a strong constructive and avant-gardist bent since the 50s. The first works created by Lenora de Barros can be placed in the field of ‘visual poetry’ springing from the concrete poetry movement of the decade of 1950. Words and images were her initial materials.
In 1983 LB published the book “Onde Se Vê” [“Where One See”], a set of rather uncommon “poems”. Some of them dispensed with the use of words, constructed as photographic sequences where the artist herself acted out different characters in performance acts. This book already announced Lenora de Barros’s transit into the field of visual arts, what eventually came to happen. Since then, the artist has been following her own personal path, marked by the use of diversified languages: video, performance, photography, sound installation and construction of objects.
Among the recents exhibitions and activities stands out in Resistance Performed—Aesthetic Strategies under Repressive Regimes in Latin America, Migros Museum, Zurich, 2015, L’Eloge de l’heure, MUDAC – Musée de design et d’arts appliqués contemporains, Lausanne, Suiça, 2015, Poder provisório | Fotografia no Acervo do MAM, curada por Eder Chiodetto, Museu de Arte Moderna de SP-MAM, São Paulo-SP, 2014, 140 Caracteres, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo-MAM, Alimentário, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro-RJ, curada por Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, Encruzilhada , sob a curadoria de Bernardo Mosqueira, Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro-RJ, 2015, Umas e Outras, sob a curadoria de Glória Ferreira, PIVÔ, São Paulo-SP, 2014, ULTRAPASSADO I e II, Broadway 1602, New York, 2014, Pregação, sob a curadoria de Daniel Rangel, ICCO + Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY, we have nothing to say, Mandragoras Art Space, em parceria com Laura Lona, New York, USA.
Publications:
RELIVRO, based on the exhibition REVÍDEO in the cultural center of Oi Futuro in 2010, Rio de Janeiro-RJ where she gathers much of her work from 1975 to 2010. The book is bilingual, English and Portuguese, and includes texts by Augusto de Campos, Tadeu Chiarelli and Alberto Saraiva.
COISA EM SI (THING IN ITSELF), interview given to Eduardo Xavier de Souza and published in book form by the Publisher Zouk, Porto Alegre, 2011 (bilingual, English / Portuguese).