Thirtieth Sao Paulo Biennial

Although the proposal differs, one might say that the weight assigned to the curatorial design is similar. The same applies to the complex network of relationships articulating such a wide range of works that it easily encompasses the most extreme contemporaneity and a past which is practically unknown or barely evoked. As on the mentioned occasion, the curatorial thread introduced this time by Luis Pérez Oramas and his team has been painstakingly developed in a complex and encompassing sense.

°The Imminence of Poetics° − such the title that presides over the Thirtieth Sao Paulo Biennial − rests upon a solid field work that rescues novelty, but without the compulsive avidity that has characterized these types of exhibitions, increasingly concerned with showing the most recent and exotic developments of the season. Here novelty is inscribed within the historical perspective that made it possible, and it accounts for the fact that the present is part of a construction in the process of becoming.

Thus, one of the main attractions of this Biennial are the discoveries that enable generational exchanges between emerging artists, many of them practically unknown, and remarkable historical masters such as Robert Smithson or Allan Kaprow, and still others rescued from oblivion, such as Bas Jan Ader, the Dutch performer who disappeared in 1975 in the middle of the Atlantic while sailing on a small boat that was taking him “In Search of the Miraculous”.

All this has been possible because the curator decided not only to detach himself from novelty for novelty’s sake but also from its inevitable consequence: the spectacular element, the large scale, and the great names that operate as a guarantee in the circuits of the international art scene. Challenging that logic is one of the best decisions of Pérez-Oramas’s team, and it is what to a great extent has conferred singularity to its work. A sober hypothesis, as complex as it is bold, which was implemented on the basis of a constellate structure.

What does this proposal of “constellations”, which was accompanied, moreover, by a spatial organization, actually imply? The idea refers to a field of play in which associations are possible. But in that notion, the concrete poetry of Eugen Gomringer also reverberates as strongly as Walter Benjamin’s working procedures for Passages, and those of Aby Warburg for his ambitious Mnemosyne Atlas. In any case, they are organizations of meaning that tune in scholarly references, but that have been possible thanks to the curator’s professional competence.

A critic and poet, former curator of the Cisneros Collection and current Curator of Latin American Art at the MoMA, Pérez Oramas has carried out projects for the latter institution that may be considered precedents for this Biennial. Under the enigmatic umbrella of “The Imminence of Poetics”, the show has now harbored a little over a hundred artists, around forty less than the past edition, which has undoubtedly brought relief to the Fundação Bienal’s meager funds while definitely not affecting the quality of the event.

The exhibition, displayed in the three floors of the Niemayer Building, is somehow structured around two historical figures that take center stage for different and similar reasons.

One of them is Arthur Bispo do Rosário, an outsider in the art world who participated in the Venice Biennale in 2005 and whose work toured Europe and the United States with the exhibition “Brazil 500 Years”. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Bispo spent fifty years confined in a psychiatric institution. In his delirium, he received from the angels the mission to draft an inventory of the world to submit to God on the Day of the Last Judgment. This led him to embroider countless pieces of cloth with fantastic cosmologies and to create objects with waste materials following a cumulative logic practiced by several artists in the show. Three hundred works resulting from this obsessive production occupy a strategic place in the Biennial Pavilion.

The other figure that enjoys a similar symbolic space is August Sander. More than six hundred portraits included in his famous “People of the 20th Century”, a monumental photographic series depicting German society, occupy several sections of panels in the Pavilion’s third floor. Displayed in a series of grids, these portraits constitute the most meticulous archive of types and classes imaginable. Physical types, occupations, customs and clothing portray the German people in the first half of the 20th century. Midway between madness and sanity, both of them coincide in an obsession for recording which probably does not differ from the one that modernity appropriated in a more extensive way.

Thus Sander’s series are shown in the vicinity of the photographs of Congolese individuals and social collectives shot by Ambroise Ngaimoko in Kinshasha and the male nudes by the Rio de Janeiro artist Alair Gomes. But they are also close to the Polaroid photos by the German Horst Ademeit, discovered a little before his death in 2010. Another obsessive register, accompanied by annotations that account for the emotional state that led him to wish to establish, through this medium, some kind of order for this chaotic world. There are also the series by the Dutch photographer Hans Eijkelnoom, who stands in a corner specifically to take pictures of the passing visitors wearing similar clothes.

Unlike in the case of other biennials, large-scale works are almost absent from this event. What really makes a difference is the volume of works representing each artist. And the space each artist has been assigned in order that each poetics comprehensively reaches the public. In this way, nobody will be able to deny that artists who were not too well known by the Biennial’s public, such as the Argentineans Eduardo Stupía, Martín Legón and Pablo Accinelli, or Frederic Bruly Bouabre, from the Ivory Coast, to name just a few, have had their chance at the show. The space designed by the Argentinean architect Martin Corullón undoubtedly contributed to this. His clever division of space made it possible to overcome the difficulties posed by the complexity of the Pavilion Building and accompany the multiple drift of multiple senses that this subtle and sensitive exhibition proposes.