São Paulo – The Guimarães Rosa Institute – Beirut, the cultural center of the Embassy of Brazil in Lebanon, will host as of Tuesday, June 27, the Master Bedroom and Maid’s Room exhibition. The show brings pictures and texts from the homonymous project developed by Brazilian photographer, researcher and professor José Afonso Jr.
The exhibition guides visitor through images of contrasting rooms and objects and the tensions between them. There’re photographs of neat, nicely decorated bedrooms with nice views. There’re also images of smaller, windowless, clattered, messy painted rooms.
“The maid’s room is the sedimentation of centuries of domination,” says curator Eduardo Queiroga was quoted as saying in a statement, adding that recent changes in the Brazilian legislation diminished the number of housekeepers sleeping in the job and many of these rooms were converted into storage rooms.
Master Bedroom and Maid’s Room is a visual research project developed by José Afonso from 2018 to 2020 with support from the Fund of Incentive to the Culture of Pernambuco and features photographs and texts published on the website created for the project, in Brazilian Portuguese. For the exhibition in Beirut, the material was printed for the first time, featuring Arabic and English texts.
José Afonso works on documental projects and advises authorial projects by other photographers. He is an associate professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco, where he’s a researcher and advises theses, dissertations, undergraduate research. He’s also a curator and a photography critic, and he holds a post-doctoral degree from the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and a doctoral and a master’s degree in Communication and Contemporary Cultures from the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil.
“The Embassy of Brazil in Beirut bets on the power of the art to represent the complex realities and foster the intercultural dialogue,” added the embassy in the statement. The embassy said this’ll be the first of a series of exhibitions to be held at the Guimarães Rosa Institute – Beirut, addressing social, environmental, and human rights topics that are relevant to the societies of both countries.
Quick facts:
Master Bedroom and Maid’s Room exhibition
June 27 till July 28, 2023
Opening: the 27th , at 6 pm
Visits: Monday to Friday, 11 am – 7 pm
Find out more
Guimarães Rosa Institute
Mar Mitr Street, Achrafieh – Beirut – Lebanon
Translated by Guilherme Miranda
