calendario eventi  :: 

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11/9/2013

9th Bienal do Mercosul

Different Venues , Porto Alegre

Artistic Director and Chief Curator: Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy

The 9th Bienal do Mercosul | Porto Alegre takes place from September 13 to November 10, 2013, in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil. It consists of an exhibition of contemporary art, including performances and events of various kinds, presented in different venues across the city. Its pedagogical program, Cloud Formations, started on May 17, 2013, along with special public programs and film screenings.

The 9th Bienal is organized by the Fundação Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul, a nonprofit institution in Porto Alegre with the mission of developing cultural and educational visual arts projects to encourage dialogue amongst diverse communities. The title of this ninth edition of the Bienal is, in Portuguese, Se o clima for favorável; in Spanish, Si el tiempo lo permite; in English, Weather Permitting. These titles are an invitation to ponder when and how, by whom and why, certain artworks and ideas gain or lack visibility at a given moment in time.

The promises of the 9th Bienal do Mercosul | Porto Alegre are to identify, propose and repurpose changing belief systems and appraisals of experimentation and innovation. It intends to raise ontological and technological questions through artistic practice, object making and nodes of experience. This edition of the Bienal can be considered an environment in which to encounter natural resources and material culture in a new light, and to speculate on the bases that have marked distinctions between discovery and invention, as well as the values of both sustainability and entropy.

To achieve this, the 9th Bienal brings together visual art and other kinds of contributions to address the meeting points of nature and culture. It gathers works together that explore different kinds of atmospheric disturbances propelling travel and social displacement, technological advancement and world development, vertical expansions in space, and transversal explorations through time. This project involves looking at the affections these movements provoke, and the affects that manifest themselves. It entails dwelling, mining, investigating and exploring what is below and above the social realm—what is palpable and tenuous, what is undersea and in the atmosphere, what is underground and in outer space.

As a metaphor, a microorganism –living elements that, with great expansion and adaptation capability, influence what is to come– is the best explanation of what education means in the 9th Bienal do Mercosul | Porto Alegre. Regarded as a living organism both in and out of the exhibition spaces, education is a strength and a state of mind, is affection and affects us, is thought and action. While considering this, the pedagogical project of the ninth edition wants turn the experience into something meaningful. It presents a series of actions and activities that has the program Cloud Formations as its spine. As an integrated initiative for training mediators, educators, curious and art aficionados, Cloud Formations proposes the creation of a knowledge network that is activated by the integration of different audiences around subjects from the conceptual proposal of 9th Bienal and its relations to everyday practice.

Among the activities that happens from May to November 2013, there are meetings and dialogues with artists, curators, technicians, workers and intellectuals; workshops; field conversations; a residence program for mediators and educators and interchange with universities. Also as part of the program, there are a distance-learning platform of training, forums, and the reader The Cloud with texts on nature, culture, science, art and mediations. A pedagogical material for teachers and educators, Manual para curiosos [A Manual for the Curious], is composed by a booklet, fourteen plates of art works, and eight posters on scientific instruments.

The project Field Conversations complete the activities of Cloud Formations. It is a series of travels to different places in Rio Grande do Sul aiming to decentralize the 9th Bienal not only spatially but also conceptually, proposing to leave the restricted field of art to understand how processes generated in other fields can also affect and move us.

By focusing its curatorial endeavor on the interactions between nature and culture and the way artists address their relation and drifts, the 9th Bienal presents itself as a widely educational project. Thus, in addition to the actions of the program Cloud Formations the Home School of Invention is a workshop of inventions, work space, studio and lab, which focuses on activities related to topics such as technology, invention, contraptions, and poetic processes in art and education. Headquartered in Memorial do Rio Grande do Sul, the Home School of Invention operates during the biennial’s exhibition, from September 13 to November 10. Scheduled for November, the symposium Someone Who Knows Something... and Someone Who Knows Something Else: Education as Encounter will discuss education as an event (or a site) where people meet, where everyone knows something that the other lacks, and vice versa. It will address the educational practice, its dialogic space and its ethical relations.

The pedagogical project is also directly linked with Island Sessions and is responsible for the creation, production and the open call of Home Inventions.

The Cloud Formations is possible with the support, cooperation and affection of: Centro Cultural CEEE Erico Verissimo; Centro Municipal de Cultura Dr. Henrique Ordovás Filho; FLOEMA – Núcleo de estudos em estética e educação, Fundação Vera Chaves Barcellos, Grupo Patafísica: mediadores do imaginário, IAB-RS, Inhotim - Instituto de Arte Contemporânea e Jardim Botânico, Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul Ado Malagoli, Memorial do Rio Grande do Sul, Memorial dos Povos Indígenas, Museu da Imagem e do Som de Santa Catarina, Museu de Ciências e Tecnologia da PUCRS, Santander Cultural, Secretaria de Educação do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul, Secretaria Municipal Da Cultura De Caxias Do Sul, Secretaria Municipal de Educação de Porto Alegre, Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul - UFRGS, Unisinos, Usina do Gasômetro.

A group exhibition will gather existing and newly created artworks, some of which were created through collaborative commissioning programs, as well as an active program of performance, film screenings and events.

The exhibition of the 9th Bienal do Mercosul | Porto Alegre will present art as portals to other worlds—to imaginations, explorations and manifestations of what is underneath and above conventions in the social realm. It will act as a launching platform for traveling—in time, in thought—to the yet socially inhabited depths of the sea, earth and outer space. The exhibition will include artworks that are aesthetic field explorations in dialogue with marine biology to studies of the unconscious and treasure hunts; so-called natural disasters, tectonic shifts and mining activities that provoke social mobility and bio-political migrations; and explorations into air and space technology, from cloud studies and sound barriers to satellite belts and science fiction.

In addition, the exhibition will present art projects created through innovative collaborations between artists and companies or research centers working with natural resources and/or advanced technology. Some projects included have been especially commissioned for the 9th Bienal do Mercosul | Porto Alegre and created in Brazil; other projects included came about through seminal art commissioning programs, from the 1960s to the present, involving collaborations between visual artists and science- or technology-based corporations and research centers worldwide. These art projects are imagination machines—inspiring and moving, formally strange and materially improbable if it weren’t for collaboration. As several of these artworks and projects were, may be, process- or time-based, ephemeral or destroyed, or are unable to be presented as these are practically invisible or simply delicate or monumental for transportation, these will be presented within Ekphrasis in the exhibition, where artists and project interpreters offer these as talks, recitals and performances.

The exhibition will also include artworks, performances and other time-based events that differ from what’s been described above—artistic projects that fall in between or just outside these ideas—but that have nonetheless been there since the start, simply because without these artists and their work many of what we experience and produce today would be impossible. Some of the artists are considered gravitational forces in the curatorial endeavor, and some of the artworks are monotypes, conceptual islands and forms of cairn within the exhibition.

Resonating with the curatorial endeavors and artistic projects, the communication strategy of the 9th Bienal do Mercosul | Porto Alegre reflects on the historical changes in communication technology throughout centuries. Information is being rolled out and experienced in diverse media channels to share news on the biennial, and to serve as creative mediation tools between its contents and forms, the institution and audiences. Media channels and communication strategies that have been or will be used include smoke signals, telegrams, messenger birds, a message in a bottle, and radio broadcasts, among others.

The 9th Bienal do Mercosul | Porto Alegre does not have a fixed logo mark; instead, the graphic design studio Project Projects was commissioned Porto Alegre, a bespoke typographic system. The symbol set adapts glyphs from several scientific contexts, including meteorological charts, condition maps, and early prototype versions of the Periodic Table. Referencing this wide range of signifiers, each letter acts as a microcosm of translation and encoded communication.


A series of curated discussions taking place at the deserted island popularly called Ilha do Presídio, which is located in the Guaíba, across from Porto Alegre.
Please consult the calendar for details http://9bienalmercosul.art.br/calendar/

Curatorial Team
Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy is the artistic director and chief curator of the 9th Bienal do Mercosul | Porto Alegre. The curatorial team includes Mônica Hoff, ground curator and head of Cloud Formations; Raimundas Malašauskas, time curator; Bernardo de Souza, space curator; and curatorial cloud fellows Sarah Demeuse, Daniela Pérez, Júlia Rebouças, and Dominic Willsdon. Luiza Proença is the editorial coordinator.

Contact Info
Fundação Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul
Rua General Bento Martins, 24, sala 1201 Centro, Porto Alegre - RS, 90010-080 - Brasil Tel: +55 51 3254.7500 E-mail: contato@bienalmercosul.art.br

Press contact:
Ariela Dedigo Tel: +55 51 3254-7532 imprensa@bienalmercosul.art.br

Official opening ceremony september 12th, 2013 7 p.m.
Local: Memorial do Rio Grande do Sul Rua Sete de Setembro, 1020 – Centro Histórico, Porto Alegre, RS

Santander Cultural
Rua Sete de Setembro, 1028 Centro Histórico Porto Alegre - RS Tuesday to Sunday, 9am to 7pm.
Thursday until 9pm.

Museu de Artes do Rio Grande do Sul – MARGS
Praça da Alfândega Centro Histórico Porto Alegre - RS Tuesday to Sunday, 9am to 7pm.

Usina do Gasômetro
Av. Presidente João Goulart, 551 Centro Histórico Porto Alegre - RS Tuesday to Sunday, 9am to 9pm.

Memorial do Rio Grande do Sul
Rua Sete de Setembro, 1020 Centro Histórico Porto Alegre - RS Tuesday to Sunday, 9am to 7pm.

stampa

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