19th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil: Southern Panoramas | Seminar “Places and meanings in art: debates from the South”

The seminar Places and meanings in art: debates from the South, curated and mediated by Sabrina Moura, looks to expand on key issues raised by the shows that make up the 19th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil. In connection with the Southern Observatory study program, initiated in May 2015 in partnership with the Goethe-Institut, the seminar will discuss the expansion of art as a knowledge production field. Over the course of four meetings in October, the public will engage in dialogue with thinkers, writers and artists to rethink their traditions, spaces of circulation, narratives, and histories.

Panel 1: Rethinking Traditions: Art, Gesture and Contemporaneity is conducted by visual artist Abdoulaye Konaté (Mali), curator Júlia Rebouças (Brazil), curator and art critic N’Goné Fall (Senegal), and artist and art critic Roy Dib (Lebanon) and takes place on October 7th. The panel will approach the notion of contemporary art as a response to a specific system, underpinned by certain practices, players, and institutions. As the 20th century progressed, with the “dematerialization” of the artwork, new languages began to coexist with art objects of various natures, many of them associated with past traditions. Amid the multiple temporalities shared by the present, what is the meaning of a supposed idea of transcendence? If the contemporary primarily encompasses the present moment, how does one rethink and broaden the categories of art?

On October 10th, the panel Rethinking Spaces: Art, Uses and Daily Life will be conducted by artists Berhanu Ashagrie Deribew (Ethiopia), Hoor Al-Qasimi (Sharjah),
Keli Safia-Maksud (Kenya), and curator Till Fellrath (Switzerland). Outside institutional spaces, art seeps into daily life and interferes with how people perceive the world. Artistic creation transcends formatted educational practices to become a powerful tool for production of meaning, knowledge, and critical thinking. The panel questions what places does art occupy today and what uses does the artwork suggest to us.

Rethinking Narratives: Art, Memory and Fiction, the third meeting, will happen on October 22 with curator and professor Andrea Giunta, professor Júlio Pimentel (Brazil), essayist, psychoanalyst and professor Tânia Rivera (Brazil), and artist Ting-Ting Cheng (Taiwan) artist. The panel discusses creative works which, devoid of any proof or documentation, look for word and image junctures that allow an escape from a world reduced to what is visible and into the realm of imagination.

Finally, the panel Rethinking Time: Art, Silences and Histories will take place on October 29 with art critic and curator Gerardo Mosquera; curator, artist and publisher Karol Radziszewski (Poland); journalist and DJ Ntone Edjabe (Cameroon) is a journalist and a DJ; artist and professor Dor Guez (Israel); and artist Cristiano Lenhardt (Brazil). The meeting will discuss the practices of thinkers and artists who look to destabilize (or reiterate) the limiting political forces of history and memory. After all, immersed in contexts marked by history’s dilemmas, the art sphere inevitably expresses the relationships that inform the social fabric. Its discourses, silences, or denouncements reveal the tensions between what we wish to remember or to forget.

All panels will take place at the theatre of Sesc Pompeia and tickets must be collected one hour before the activity.