Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Last night saw the premiere of the Southern Panoramas | Guest Artists and Southern Panoramas | Selected Works exhibitions of the 19th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil | Southern Panoramas. This morning (Oct 7) at the Sesc Pompeia Theater, artists Abdoulaye Konaté and Roy Dib and curators Júlia Rebouças and N’Goné Fall gathered for the first panel of the Seminar Places and Meanings in Art: Debates from the South, entitled Rethinking traditions: art, gesture and contemporaneity, curated and moderated by Sabrina Moura.

The Malian-born Abdoulaye Konaté, a key artist in the Southern Panoramas | Guest Artists exhibit, recounted his art career to the audience. In a critical tone, he asserted that traditional Fine Arts teaching “does not contemplate our culture. It is classical, academic, Western. As if our culture wasn’t a part of the global scene.” To change this around, the artist, who holds a degree from the School of Fine Arts in Mali and completed his higher education in art in Cuba, decided to create his own course, at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers Multimédia, built on three pillars: academic training; traditional Malian culture; and new technologies. “My intention with these three pillars was to enable the new generation of artists to make their mark at an international level,” he said.

Abdoulaye said he drew inspiration for the works shown at Sesc Pompeia from an encounter with the guarani native tribe in Ubatuba. “When I saw the different tones created by the natives, their use of color, I realized they might just as well have been anywhere in the world. As soon as I got back to the hotel, I started drawing and sketching. I got to see their ornaments, their featherwork. No academic could ever say that those are not art. By the time I left Brazil, I had made up my mind about what I was going to create,” said he, who made a large-scale piece that also pays tribute to Brazil’s continental size. “Brazil is so big it’s scary.” The artist claims he works “with all that’s beautiful in the world and with all the suffering in the world.” The latter category includes artworks dealing with issues such as epidemics, migration, civil war.

One of Lebanon’s leading contemporary artists, Roy Dib confessed that he was influenced by the likes of  Akram Zaatari e Walid Raad and discussed his creative process, highlighting Mondial 2010 and A spectacle of privacy, which are featured in the Selected Works show and portray (the former film) the struggle of a homosexual couple who conceal their identity in order to leave Lebanon and cross the border into Palestine, under siege by Israel, and the second film shows the same couple’s intimacy, in a hotel room, after crossing the border. “I sought to create dialogues between them that were analogous to the Israeli-Palestinian issue,” he explains.

A curator and art critic, N’Goné Fall presented work by artists from several African countries. Regarding the subject of the panel, N’Goné mentioned that she favors the term culture over the term tradition. “It’s broader. There isn’t a tradition that can purport to be ‘African’ — Africa comprises 54 countries.”

In her speech, the curator, who’s also a member of the Jury for the 19^th Festival, discussed contemporary African artists like El Anatsui, and the differences between how his work is viewed through the eyes of Europe and the United States, and through the eyes of West Africa. “The interpretations are different,” citing as an example a piece created from waste material. "For Western critics, the piece is about the environmental issue. For us, it harks back to the royal textiles of Ghana, to the Ashanti Empire.”

Júlia Rebouças, a member of the 19^th Festival’s team of curators, discussed the 18-month-long curation process, which also involved Bernardo José de Souza, Bitu Cassundé, João Laia and Solange Farkas. She mentioned that the Selected Works exhibition had over 3000 submissions, and expounded on issues shared by the work of the 53 shortlisted artists. Rebouças talked at length about the guest artists and those featured in the Commissioned Projects show, in what she called a “comprehensive overview” of the 19^th Festival.