Videobrasil Collection in Context #2

The “Videobrasil Collection in Context #2” exhibition builds on Associação Cultural Videobrasil’s collection activation policy, featuring works by Poland’s Karol Radziszewski and Brazil’s Vitor Cesar at Galpão VB. The two artists were invited to participate in the second edition of the Associação’s artist residency project and are showing artworks which investigate, through different sets of principles, the notions of collection and archive.

The“Videobrasil Collection in Context #2” project was bred by the partnership between Videobrasil, the A-I-R Laboratory curatorial artist residency program, run by the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, as part of a program to promote Polish culture in Brazil, organized by Culture.pl in 2016. Both Videobrasil and the Ujazdowski Castle are recognized for their involvement in the contemporary art scene and associated with important collections in their own countries. They welcomed the artists for an initial two-week visit, allowing them to acclimate themselves to the local realities and draft a work proposal for the three months of residency that would ensue. During their residency, the artists developed the artworks that are now being shown to the public in São Paulo in the“Videobrasil Collection in Context #2” exhibit.

In the installation “Anfibologia, tradução”, Vitor Cesar addresses the urban space as an open archive, a meeting place where day-to-day experience takes on subtle new layers of meaning (the term amphibology is derived from the Greek amphibolia, which in modern linguistics means ambiguity or duplicity of meaning in a syntactic construction, either conscious or unconscious). Karol Radziszewski presents his Queer Archives Institute (QAI), a constantly expanding research project that retrieves, from private collections, graphic materials and images relating to the queer experience in Eastern European countries. In a bid to expand his collection to other countries across the geopolitical South, the artist incorporates materials into the QAI that allow a brief reconstitution of the history of the presence of gay, lesbian and transgender people in Brazil. The diversity of records and eras amassed by Radziszewski attempts to trace back the genealogy of those productions, finally retrieving them from the grip of secrecy.