Histórias Mestiças

Histórias Mestiças comes as a result of more than two years of research by curatorsAdriano Pedrosa e Lilia Schwarcz on the forming matrices of the Brazilian people, the ‘mixed-race breeding’ issue and how it affected artistic production.

The purpose of this exhibition is to tease the audience and shed light on a topic still shyly addressed among us Brazilians, according to the curators: who ‘mixed’ who? How can one mix social inclusion with social exclusion? How do pleasure and domination match each other? Which are the stories hidden within this process of miscegenation? These are questions that are all too often left unattended.

Divided into six different cores, the exhibition rubs down canvases, sculptures, installations, maps, indigenous and African artifacts, photos, documents, texts, videos and stories. The curators’ proposed approach is to put together and assign revisited meanings to diverse types of language without displaying cultures in hierarchy, mixing up generations of artists and authors with theme and conceptual crossroads, where ordering them chronologically is not a concern.

The 400-piece set of works assembled for this purpose, consisting of originals in all types of media, part of which never exhibited before – comes from 60 major Brazilian and international collections, including, among others, Musée Quai Branly, the National Museum of Denmark, Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros – (Institute of Brazilian Studies) – IEB/SP, Museum of Archeology and Ethnology – MAE/USP, Brazil’s National Museum of Fine Arts and Mario de Andrade collections.