April 2 (Saturday), 1pm, opening of the exhibition at Galpão VB
April 2 (Saturday) from 1pm to 5pm will see the opening of Bittersweet [Agridoce, in Portuguese] an exhibition by the South African artist Haroon Gunn-Salie at Galpão VB. The idea for the show came about because of the artist’s relation with people who were directly affected by the environmental disaster of last year in Mariana – caused by the collapse of two dams in Minas Gerais State. Created in collaboration with local residents who refused to move away from their land, the project has bred a powerful platform – one that can give visibility to the event and stir public reaction. Thus, Gunn-Salie establishes his art as activism and action for social change. The show is the outcome of the 1st SP-Arte/Videobrasil Prize, a special award of the 19th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil | Southern Panoramas, held from October to December 2015, and will be displayed at Galpão VB until June 11, 2016.
In Bittersweet, South Africa’s Haroon Gunn-Salie prompts fresh bewilderment at the events of the disaster. He works with the desire to affirm collective work as a response to real-life tragedies, and insistently symbolizes something that gets lost repeatedly – the experience of those defeated. A large-scale installation, a video, a series of photos and a film were produced by Gunn-Salie in collaboration with locals who had their properties flooded with layers of mud and toxic heavy metals. Death, as well as the destruction of real estate and of the region’s ecosystem are the aftermath of the accident. The artist collected and transported from the accident site all of the material that composes his site-specific work (including the mud and the walls of a partially buried house, for instance). Impregnated with the urgency of the present, this set of artworks showing at Galpão VB strives – amid the silence that acts upon personal experiences and narratives – to retrieve the human dimension of the story.
The project was born after the artist took trips to Minas and got in touch with the communities of Paracatu de Baixo and Pedras, between October 2015 and January 2016. In his first trip to the region, he spent two weeks documenting the communities and collecting oral accounts. A few days after returning to South Africa, Gunn-Salie got wind of the tragedy in the properties run by Samarco and Vale do Rio Doce. He decided to go back, and decided what would be the theme of his exhibit at Galpão VB.
“I took this opportunity to become involved in a transformative art project that borders on social responsibility and invites the public to participate,” explained Gunn-Salie, who concerns himself with telling stories that are usually forgotten. “By translating orally transmitted accounts and stories into works of art as well as collaborative, dialogue-based interventions, I wanted to bring to the Brazilian context a work method that insists art can be used for social change and grassroots activism,” he explains.
On the same day Bittersweet opens, Galpão VB will also showcase the results of the second Videobrasil in Context project edition, held under the Videobrasil Residency Program. Videobrasil Collection in Context #2 will feature works by Brazil’s Vitor Cesar and Poland’s Karol Radziszewski, invited by Associação Cultural Videobrasil and A-I-R Laboratory – the artist residency program of the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, in Warsaw (Poland) – to participate in this edition, with support from the Adam Mickiewicz Institute (IAM) as part of a program to promote Polish culture in Brazil, organized by Culture.pl in 2016. Just like Bittersweet, Videobrasil Collection in Context #2 will be showing until June 11.
The SP-Arte/Videobrasil Prize
Since its inception, in 1983, the Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil has invested in an award policy based on a grand cash prize, designed as a production incentive, and on artist residency prizes to encourage interaction and exchange processes. Last year, in its 19th edition, the Festival broke new ground with this special prize, made possible through the SP-Arte/Associação Cultural Videobrasil partnership.“For the first time ever, the Festival awarded the SP-Arte/Videobrasil Prize to encourage and publicize the work of young artists whose research contributes to discussion on the global South. The prize offers the winning artist an exhibition at Galpão VB, held concurrently with SP-Arte, at a time when São Paulo takes center stage in the international art scene,” explains the Festival chief curator and Associação Cultural Videobrasil director Solange Farkas.
The initiative is also part of SP-Arte’s artist incentive and new talent development program. According to Fernanda Feitosa, the director of the SP-Arte Fair, this is a chance to broaden the ties that bind SP-Arte and Videobrasil together, aside from mutual professional admiration. “This is the first time SP-Arte holds an exhibition by an international artist in Brazil that results from a prize. We are very excited about this connection between Southern Hemisphere scenes, after all we have multiple narratives and contexts in common,” says the Fair’s director. The exhibition by Haroon Gunn-Salie, a leading figure in the up-and-coming generation of South African artists, is the end result of the prize created as part of this strategy by the two organizations.
MORE ON THE 1st SP-ARTE/VIDEOBRASIL PRIZE WINNING ARTIST
Haroon Gunn-Salie (1989, Cape Town, South Africa)
Haroon Gunn-Salie’s productions are based on oral accounts to build art interventions and multidisciplinary installations that translate the experiences of specific communities or individuals. Straddling a wide variety of media and languages, he focuses on collaborative forms of work, founded on dialogue and exchange. Witness (2012), his graduate exhibition, featured a body of work that sheds light on forced removals during the apartheid regime, working with residents from District Six, the downtown area in Cape Town where said removals took place.
Gunn-Salie holds a degree in Sculpture from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, in Cape Town (2012). His major exhibitions include 89-plus project (2014), curated by Simon Castets and Hans Ulrich Obrist; Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design, which toured the Vitra Design Museum and the Guggenheim in Bilbao (2015); What Remains is Tomorrow, at the Venice Biennale’s South African pavilion (2015); and the 19th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc Videobrasil (2015), designed to encourage and spread the work of upcoming artists who explore issues relating to the global South, where he won the first SP-Arte/Videobrasil Prize. As part of the prize, the artist presents the exhibition Bittersweet at Galpão VB, during the SP-Arte/2016. Haroon Gunn-Salie lives between Johannesburg (South Africa) and Belo Horizonte (Brazil).
FACT SHEET
BITTERSWEET EXHIBITION | SP-ARTE/VIDEOBRASIL PRIZE
by Haroon Gunn-Salie (South Africa)
Opening: April 2 (Saturday), 1pm to 5pm
Dates and hours: April 5 to June 11. Tuesday to Friday, from 12pm to 6pm, Saturday, from 11am to 5pm.
free admission