Body discourses [the vertigo of Rio]

The Museu de Arte do Rio, under the management of Instituto Odeon, opens Body discourses [the vertigo of Rio]. The result of wide-ranging research carried out under the curatorship of Paulo Herkenhoff and co-curatorship of Milton Guran, the exhibition brings together 800 works by renowned artists – such as Evandro Teixeira, Pierre Verger, Mario Testino, Bruno Veiga and Ana Stewart – and names that are less well-known, but who equally capture the essence of the Carioca soul through their work. The exhibition is part of the FotoRio 2016 programme and is sponsored by the J.P. Morgan bank.

On show throughout the Olympic Games, the exhibition takes as its starting point the body of the people who live in the city in order to bring into discussion social identity as a kind of gestural slang. This transversal approach, a common characteristic in many exhibitions in MAR, is repeated in Body discourses, which is divided into sections and brings the tone of the most diverse facets of life in the city.

Among the trends that are launched here are the highline and train surfing. The camaraderie and the closeness between classes, made possible by strong social segregation, are present in images of the old Ipanema Pier and the day-to-day of samba and the favela communities. Also on show are the masses in the Maracanã stadium, political protests and even the queues at the INSS work and pensions office. The famous hip swinging covers of Bossa Nova albums, Afro culture, the relationship with the sea, and the characters of the imagery of Rio also feature in the exhibition.

Going against the beauty of being Carioca, the visitor is confronted by a melancholic Rio that is marked by violence, by an opposition to the pleasure. In this context, three series deserve attention: the first, by the artist Ana Khan, shows the void left in the exact spot where people were the victims of stray bullets; following this same poetic, photos by the collective Mão na Lata, taken by pinhole cameras – which due to the slow fixation of the image don’t capture movement – show places where there are only constructions, without any kind of life; finishing of this section is the Federal University series, by Walter Carvalho, reflecting upon crime scenes in the city.