My body is a cage

“My body is a cage” is a group exhibition presented at Luciana Caravello Gallery, in Rio de Janeiro. Curated by Raphael Fonseca, the exhibition takes its title from a homonymous song of the Canadian music band Arcade Fire. As they say in the verses, “My body is a cage / that keeps me from dancing to the one I love / but my mind holds the key”, ie, it is a song that reflects on the inevitable prison to which all humans are biologically conditioned: your own body. Therefore, this curatorship intends to cast light on the relationship between body, physical imprisonment and the possibility of mental liberation through the dialogues between artists working with different languages and coming from different generations and geographies of Brazil.

Eleven artists were invited to participate in the exhibition with objects that reflect their research interests around these topics. If for some of them the relationship between human body and incarceration is through the use of materials that comes from certain classical traditions of art history (Carla Chaim, Daniel Lannes and Rodrigo Martins), others seem to have a more anthropological interest in looking both the body of the other, as to their own bodies (Eduardo Montelli, Igor Vidor, Tales Frey and Virginia de Medeiros). There are also artists who seem to contemplate the body as something in an adjacent space between human and animalistic, sometimes falling into the grotesque and the abject, built in a powerful imagetically mode (Raquel Nava and Zé Carlos Garcia) or experiencing through repetition and physical actions that verge an absence of immediate sense (Gabriela Mureb and Jorge Soledar).

Besides the artworks gathered in the exhibition space, six artists were invited to perform actions every Saturday of the exhibition, during the afternoon period. Leandra Espírito Santo (29/10, opening), Felipe Abdala (05/11), Obá (12/11), Miro Spinelli (19/11), Elen Braga (26/11) and Gabriela Mureb (03/12) will present works that dialogue with the field of performance, but may also be seen as extensions of the limits of language to events that invites to the body participation of the public, experience the sound or that are configured as banal actions where the narrative drama becomes absent.