São Paulo – Works by artists from Kuwait and Lebanon will be on show in the 20th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil until January 14, 2018 at São Paulo’s SESC Pompeia. The festival highlights cultural production from across the Global South, as it sets out to convey the numerous crises facing contemporary society. The Southern Panoramas exhibition portrays art’s drive to broaden and subvert world views.
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The program began in October. In a bid to express the geopolitical representation of art, the festival selected videos, paintings, installations, sculptures, photographs and engravings by 50 artists from 25 countries, including 15 Brazilian and four Arab artists – two from Lebanon and two from Kuwait. Latin American, African and Asian artists are featured as well.
Kuwait’s Alia Farid, who lives in Kuwait City and Puerto Rico, created a set of tapestry pieces in partnership with Jesus ‘Bubu’ Negrón. The duo submitted pictures of mosques in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, in Central America, to Iranian weavers who created tapestry to mimic the photos. The pieces deal with the tensions bred by contemporary culture and migration flows, and their role in conveying signs, emblems and habits.
The featured installation by Lebanon’s Roy Dib is the outcome of a performance enacted early on in the festival. “Here and There – São Paulo Edition” tells the story of Aleppo, one of the Syrian cities that were worst-hit by war, where the shelterless resort to curtains and carpets for protection. The performance sees a curtain wall erected by an actress who sews up patches of Eastern fabric while declaiming a text. The installation is still on show at SESC Pompeia.
Monira Al Qadiri was born in Senegal an brought up in Kuwait, where she still lives. She studied the aesthetics of sadness in the Middle East at the Tokyo University of the Arts. Her works approach religion, politics, the dissolution of identities and the oil issue in Kuwait.
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Two of her pieces are featured in the Festival. OR-BIT is a sprawling, floating sculpture, and Spectrum 1 comprises six oil drilling bits jutting out of a wall towards viewers, as though they were the oil that was extracted. Both sculptures are part of an inquiry into the impact of oil discovery and exploration across the Gulf during the first half of the 20th century.
Video installation “Not Every Day is Spring,” by Lebanon’s Haig Aivazian, tells the life story of Turkish musician Udi Hrant Kenkulian, who went on to become a symbol of violence perpetrated against Armenians.
For more on dates and hours, please go to http://www.festivalsescvideobrasil.org.br
Quick facts
20th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil
Sesc Pompeia – Rua Clélia, 93, Pompeia – São Paulo
October 3, 2017 to January 14, 2018
Tuesday to Saturday, 9 am to 10 pm
Sunday and holidays, 9 am to 8 pm
Free admission
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
