Raid 8 (Redundant Array of Independent Disks)

The Raid 8 (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) project, which will be occupying the Galeria Raquel Arnaud during the 32nd Bienal de Arte de São Paulo, is a collective in which four artists represented by the gallery – Carla Chaim, Carlos Nunes, Ding Musa and Geórgia Kyriakakis – will bring guests to take part in the exhibit – Takashi Kuribayashi, from Japan, Raul Dias Reyes and Iñaki Domingo, from Spain, and Tiago Mestre, a Portuguese artist who lives in Brazil. These guest artists produced their works in São Paulo during artistic residencies that took place before the exhibit, giving things more of an experimental mood, and more of a sense of occupation of the gallery.

This project came into being from a desire to propose and experiment with new ways of organizing and implementing exhibits, as indicated by the invitation to foreign artists, which was made directly by Brazilians. Their choices favored matters of affinity, identification or the simple desire to face the art in an exhibit space, where works are endowed with the power to define and create meaning. In this light, as noted by critic and curator, Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, who has been following the work of several of these artists and was invited to reflect on the process through a text introducing the exhibit which will be part of the catalogue released in the beginning of September, “Raid 8 falls within a genealogy of exhibits organized by artists in Brazil and around the world over the course of recent decades.”

The process of confronting /approaching the works reveals analogous procedures and common interests that guide the creation of the artists involved, regardless of geographic distances and the particularities of each individual. The use of diverse materials, the presence of drawing as a matrix of thought, the use of photography, the constant traffic between the virtual nature of the image, the concreteness of the world and the exploration of three-dimensionality, are just a few of the elements that these approaches reveal in the group’s artistic output, as explored in this exhibit. The works touch upon subjects such as the transformation and virtual essence of the image, the 3-dimensional in dialogue with the physicality and concreteness of the world. There is no assembling of works by theme, what we see, rather, is a series of conversations on different practices brought together and complementing one another in new forms of discourse.