Associação Cultural Videobrasil

The travelling exhibition Unerasable Memories — A historic look at the Videobrasil Collection is slated to open on September 11 at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Vigo, Spain and run until February 7, 2016. The first major show to feature exclusively Videobrasil Collection pieces, in a co-production with Sesc São Paulo, premiered at Sesc Pompeia, São Paulo, in August 2014, as the newest addition to a growing set of strategies designed to keep the Associação’s collection active and in touch with the world. In June 2015, the exhibition tour began in Buenos Aires, Argentina (at MALBA, Univesidad Torcuato Di Tella and the Embassy of Brazil). Before the end of 2016, Unerasable Memories will travel to Mexico as well.

Curated by Agustín Pérez Rubio, the Spanish-born art director for Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), the show features eighteen out of the Videobrasil Collection’s 1,300-plus pieces. Created between 1984 and 2013, the artworks on display are strongly political in content and perpetuate historical memories.

Unerasable memories — A historic look at the Videobrasil Collection features the artists Akram Zaatari (Lebanon), Ayrson Heráclito & Danillo Barata (Brazil), Aurélio Michiles (Brazil), Bouchra Khalili (Morocco), Carlos Motta (Colombia), Coco Fusco (USA), Dan Halter (Zimbabwe), Vincent Carelli & Dominique Gallois (France/China), Enio Staub (Brazil), Jonathas de Andrade (Brazil), León Ferrari & Ricardo Pons (Argentina), Liu Wei (China), Luiz de Abreu (Brazil), Mwangi Hutter (Kenya/Germany), Rabih Mroué (Lebanon), Rosângela Rennó (Brazil), Sebastian Diaz Morales (Argentina), and Walid Raad (Lebanon). “These artists are bent on keeping alive the memory of a conflict, a past event that has been forgotten or oft interpreted from the perspective of those who came out the victors, of those who write history and have the power to make it look like these events no longer belong to us,” the curator explains. Episodes like the “discovery" of Brazil by the Portuguese, the coup d’état in Chile, the September 11 attacks in the US, the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, or civil war in Lebanon are depicted sensitively by the featured artists in their works.

Memorias imborrables — una mirada histórica a la Colección Videobrasil
September 11, 2015 to February 7, 2016
Museu de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo | Príncipe 54, Vigo, Spain
www.marcovigo.com

Unerasable memories artworks to spur academic discussions in Germany

During the Spanish leg of the travelling exhibition, its artworks will be topics of debate in the Sense of Doubt. Resisting Oblivion art-science project, which is slated to run from September 10 to October 11, at the Museum Angewandte Kunst, as part of the program of the B3 Biennial of the Moving Image, in Frankfurt, Germany.

An initiative from human and social sciences researchers at Goethe Universität, the project will work the Unerasable memories videos into lectures and discussion panels that question the narratives of power currently in effect, in a bid to ensure a place in global contemporary discourse to alternative memories from historical events.

The project resonates with the thinking of curator Agustín Pérez Rubio, who in the exhibition statement concludes that “One cannot go forth in an amnesiac, aseptic world. The important thing (...) is to reflect about how we read history, how we keep it and evoke it in order to learn from it. We must discuss historical memory and the various ways to create it, so that we will not continue to open the newspaper and remain unmoved in the face of facts that have also happened to us and to our ancestors. So that we may forge ahead without erasing what has passed." Despite having been produced in different regions and over a thirty-year span, the artworks share at least one key aspect: their concern with rescuing from oblivion the uncomfortable recollections of conflicts, persecutions, and violence that punctuate history.

Find out more about the Sense of Doubt. Resisting Oblivion project and about the B3 Biennial of the Moving Image.