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9/9/2014

Two exhibitions

Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm

Laura Lima
10 Sep — 30 Nov 2014

Bonniers Konsthall is proud to open the fall season with the first-ever solo exhibition of Brazilian artist Laura Lima in Scandinavia.

Living things, such as the human body, play the dual role of theme and material in nearly all of Laura Lima’s work. She allows the body’s volume, its heat and its scent to occupy space within the exhibition hall; she tests its strength and movement, figuring out how it can be controlled and restrained. Lima’s artistic output is founded in a long Brazilian tradition of performance art enlisting the viewer’s participation, yet she is also fascinated in the outspoken energy of more folksy art forms such as the carnival and circus. This first large-scale solo exhibition of Laura Lima in Scandinavia features work entailing an elusive puzzle. And still Lima dares visitors to drop any expectations of what an artwork should be, inviting them to become a part of a world brimming with fantastic experiences.

The Naked Magician, the central piece in the exhibition, consists of a copious number of collected objects and a person playing the role of the magician. The installation is constantly transforming, appearing differently depending on what the varying magicians decide to do with the objects. The Naked Magician contains a powerful charge between the apparent and the unspoken. The magician openly reveals all tricks to the public, the sleeveless tailcoat making it impossible to hide any cards up the sleeves. But what the magician eventually creates, just what part of it is magical, remains a secret.

The same cryptic energy can be found in Bar/Restaurant, the second large sculptural installation in the exhibition, involving a bartender deliberately serving beer to an odd group of guests – a cone, a sphere, an umbrella –seated at neatly arranged tables and chairs. Visitors who wait around long enough will witness the glasses as they slowly empty.

The exhibition features Lima’s large-scale installations alongside a series of smaller works, pieces concealing their own well-hidden secrets. The sculpture Clown will only appear at certain times throughout the exhibition, popping up unannounced. And many visitors to the museum will completely miss the work To Age, where members of the museum staff play the leading roles. The installation Choice requires the visitor to enter a dark room alone, bearing the secret of what took place within back out again into the public sphere.

As part of the exhibition is also a unique opportunity to experience Laura Lima’s monumental work Cinema Shadow – a film installation in which a film is shot and screened simultaneously during one whole day. This version of Cinema Shadow is carried out in collaboration with the Stockholm Film Festival.

Like many of her contemporaries, Laura Lima is greatly inspired by the groundbreaking Brazilian artists of the 1960s and 70s who expanded the artistic field through the development of performance art as a more elastic definition of sculpture. It is impossible to avoid mentioning Brazilian artists Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and Helio Oiticica, three predecessors who pioneered atmosphere, movement and change as components of a work of art. In order to reveal the world of Lima, Bonniers Konsthall present an accompanying presentation of historical film material, highlighting artists and filmmakers that have been influential in Lima’s work.

Laura Lima was born in 1971 in Governador Valadares, Brazil. She currently lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Together with renowned artists Ernesto Neto and Marcio Botner, she is the founder of the Rio based internationally acclaimed gallery A Gentil Carioca. Lima contributed her work Marra – a physically demanding struggle between two male bodies – to Bonniers Konsthall’s autumn 2011 exhibition The Spiral and The Square.

The exhibition is a collaboration between Bonniers Konsthall and the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland. A catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

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Experiences of Brazilian Art and Film from the 1960s and 70s
10 Sep — 23 Nov 2014

Like many of her contemporaries, Laura Lima is greatly inspired by the groundbreaking Brazilian artists of the 1960s and 70s. Experiences is a presentation of both old and new film material, including art videos, documentaries and feature films, which offers a glimpse of an outstandingly active, engaging era in Brazilian art.

The 1960s indicated the start of an enormously active artistic period in Brazil, encompassing not only the visual arts but also film, music, poetry and design. This merging of fine art and popular culture was quickly termed Tropicália after Hélio Oiticica’s first immersive installation in 1967. Oiticica´s installation already contained audiovisual material and film soon became a space where artists and filmmakers would form a Brazilian avant-garde. Alongside the groundbreaking artists Lygia Pape and Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica developed methods of creating art that abolished the distance between the art object and spectator. Focusing on the individual and collective body they developed methods and processes to achieve sensory perceptions and a sense of total art. The time period framing the exhibition was one of military dictatorship, where physical and mental torture was an everyday occurrence. The regime’s physical violations affected artists’ work in both a purely concrete manner (many were eventually forced to go into exile), as well as thematically. In the exhibition we see how the artists used masquerade and the carnivalesque as ways to dress their political views in humor and light-heartedness. The ideas expressed in poet Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropofágico from 1928, in which a “cultural cannibalism” was advocated and from which the entire Modern Art movement in Brazil was triggered, can be sensed as an underlying tone in the films.

The films in Experiences are displayed as a collage of moving images through which the visitor may move. The viewer’s past and present experiences were crucial to artists such as Hélio Oiticica, and along with his work, the exhibition aims to create an overall visual experience, as well as allowing the visitor to delve deeper into each individual piece.

Image: Laura Lima, “The Naked Magician”, 2008/10/13, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst. Photo: Stefan Altenburger.

Sofia Curman, Communications Manager
sofia.curman(at)bonnierskonsthall.se
Phone: +46-8-736 42 66

Bonniers Konsthall
Torsgatan 19
Mon-Tue CLOSED
Wed 12-20
Thu-Sun 12-17
Entrance fee 80 kr
Senior 60 kr
Student 60 kr

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