The Langsdorff Expedition
In 1821, when Baron Langsdorff, Consul General of Russia in Brazil at that time, accepted the challenge to set up an expedition to the tropical areas of Brazil, he only dreamed of what he could find. Today, nearly 200 years later, people in Brazil can go on their own expedition and see the nature and Brazilian society portrayed in what has become one of the most important scientific expeditions of the nineteenth century. By mixing technological resources and the zeitgeist of that time, the Langsdorff Expedition reveals, through art, the discoveries made by the expedition in the fields of botany, zoology, cartography and anthropology. In addition to the 120 wash drawings and other types of drawings made by artists that accompanied the expedition – Rugendas, Taunay and Florence -, the exhibition brings astronomical navigation instruments used at that time, such as sextants and chronometers, and the predecessor of the camera, the camera obscura. And it also includes a resource which superimposes the famous cartographic maps of Rubtsov onto current Google Maps of the region. All this lulled with readings of excerpts from Langsdorff’s journal, thus creating an atmosphere of immersion in the trip and in time. And to complete the epic character of the exhibition, several computer terminals give the public access to the database of the expedition’s complete collection, which totals more than 1,000 watercolours and ethnographic objects that belong to public and private collections worldwide. An exhibition of Brazil’s historical and emotional archeology, which shows incredibly well preserved works, stored for nearly two centuries in Russia and which now return to Brazil due to the collective effort of Arte A Produções and the Russian government, which provided the expedition’s collection that belongs to the Naval Archive of Russia and the Royal Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. São Paulo – 23.02 a 25.04.2010 – Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil Brasília – 11.05 a 18.07.2010 – Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil Rio de Janeiro – 03.08 a 26.11.2010 – Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil Confira [aqui] o que foi publicado. Technical Information Curatorship Prof. Dr. Boris N. Komissarov Ania Rodríguez Alonso Rodolfo de Athayde Curatorship Assistant Laura Cosendey Director Dra. Irina Túnkina General Coordination Rodolfo de Athayde Executive Production Ione Alves Jennifer McLaughlin Production Assistants Joaquim Pedro dos Santos Isabela Sanchez Virginia Manfrinato Others Projects Kandinsky: Everything Starts From a Dot Wifredo Lam: The Spirit of Creation Visions on the Ludwig Collection Gustavo Acosta – Space of Silence To the sky, To the sky, To the sky,To the ground, To the ground, To the ground Favoretto: The Colors of My Corner 130 years of Khalil Gibran Watch me Move: The Animation Show Game On Richard Wright – This Other World Mirages – Contemporary Art in the Islamic world Carlos Garaicoa The Langsdorff Expedition Islam – Art and Civilization The Art of Cuba The Russian Turning
Islam – Art and Civilization
In times when the so-called “Arab world” has occupied the media, minds and major contemporary events, and when the chiefly political and economic clippings are not able to express all its layers, there is nothing better than art to take the plunge and do justice to one of the oldest cultures of mankind. The exhibition entitled “Islam – Art and Civilization” brings together 302 pieces that tell the 1400-year history of the Islamic world, and it shows the greatness of its influence on the history of the world, especially the West. It brings together works and pieces of jewelry, furniture, tapestry, clothing, weapons, armor, utensils, mosaics, ceramics, glassware, miniatures, paintings, calligraphy and scientific and musical instruments. In order to portray all this wealth, the exhibition featured the collections from six of the most important museums in Syria and Iran: Damascus National Museum, Museum of Popular Traditions and the Aleppo City Museum, in Syria; and the National Museum of Iran, Reza Abbasi Museum and Museum of Carpets in Tehran. And it also has art pieces from the northern countries of Africa, part of the collections from BibliASPA (South America & Arab Countries Library and Research Center) and the collection from Africas House. With works that had never been shown in Brazil, many of which had never left their home museum, the Islam exhibition is an ethnographic journey through the filigrees and arabesques of the soul of a 1000-year-old people, its history, philosophy, science and art. A mosaic of Islamic culture in space and time, seen by over six hundred thousand people and awarded as the most visited theme exhibition in 2010. Rio de Janeiro – 11.10.2010 a 26.12.2011 – Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil São Paulo – 17.01 a 27.03.2011 – Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil Brasília – 25.04 a 03.07.2011 – Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil Check [aqui]and [aqui] what was published about it. Technical Information Original Idea and General Project Direction Rodolfo de Athayde Curatorship Rodolfo de Athayde Curatorship Assistant Laura Cosendey Project Management Jennifer McLaughlin Production Assistants Joaquim Pedro dos Santos Lucia Ramos Daniele Oliveira Others Projects Kandinsky: Everything Starts From a Dot Wifredo Lam: The Spirit of Creation Visions on the Ludwig Collection Gustavo Acosta – Space of Silence To the sky, To the sky, To the sky,To the ground, To the ground, To the ground Favoretto: The Colors of My Corner 130 years of Khalil Gibran Watch me Move: The Animation Show Game On Richard Wright – This Other World Mirages – Contemporary Art in the Islamic world Carlos Garaicoa The Langsdorff Expedition Islam – Art and Civilization The Art of Cuba The Russian Turning
The Art of Cuba
By bringing to Brazil the most significant collection of Cuban art ever seen outside of the island, the exhibition entitled “Art of Cuba” presents a broad panorama of Cuban art of the twentieth century – from the emergence of the avant-garde, when Cuban art gains its own identity, passing by the aesthetic plurality that reflects the changes of the revolution in the 60’s and 70’s, to the more contemporary manifestations, whose renewal and experimentation have marked Cuban art from the 80’s until today. Comprising 122 works by 61 artists, the exhibition gives an account of this journey through a thematic approach that groups artists from different generations together, according to the common points in their arts. Names like Fidelio Ponce de León, Victor Manuel, Marcelo Pogolotti, Raúl Martínez, Sandú Darié, Luis Martínez Pedro, Humberto Castro, Arturo Cuenca, Gustavo Acosta, José Bedia, Los Carpinteros, Carlos Garaicoa, and several others still little known to the Brazilian public make up a kaleidoscope of the island. Result of a partnership between the Cultural Association Guantanamera – responsible for the dissemination of Cuban cultural production in Brazil – and the National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba (which administers much of the artistic heritage of the country), the exhibition Art of Cuba points to a central element in the production the island – the social commitment of the artist – who shows, be it through the art of explicit militancy, through the timeless drama of individual questions, or through the dialogue with the roots of Cuban culture, that the Cuban artist is capable of leaving and returning to the island, physically and conceptually, and of looking inwards and outwards at the same time, making an art that connects the local and the universal and talks with the contemporary world and its own history. São Paulo – 30.01 a 23.04.2006 – Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil Rio de Janeiro – 15.05 a 16.07.2006 – Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil Brasília – 31.07 a 15.10.2006 – Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil Curitiba – 11.10.2006 a 14.01.2007 – Museu de Oscar Niemeyer Technical Information Original Idea and General Coordination Rodolfo de Athayde Curator Ania Rodriguez Executive Production Complexo D Ione Alves Coordinator´s Assistants Mabel Meinardi Julia Favoretto Exhibition Design Complexo D Others Projects Kandinsky: Everything Starts From a Dot Wifredo Lam: The Spirit of Creation Visions on the Ludwig Collection Gustavo Acosta – Space of Silence To the sky, To the sky, To the sky,To the ground, To the ground, To the ground Favoretto: The Colors of My Corner 130 years of Khalil Gibran Watch me Move: The Animation Show Game On Richard Wright – This Other World Mirages – Contemporary Art in the Islamic world Carlos Garaicoa The Langsdorff Expedition Islam – Art and Civilization The Art of Cuba The Russian Turning
The Russian Turning
Best 2009 Exposition Award and Best 2009 International Exposition Award by Sao Paulo Association of Art Critics [ver prêmio] The Russian Turning exhibition is a revelation in many ways. It shows, in time and in art, the cultural and artistic effervescence that marked the beginning of the twentieth century in Russia and has led to important artistic movements, such as Non-Objectivism, Rayonism and especially Suprematism and Constructivism. The exhibition brings to Brazil works by essential names like Kandinsky, Chagall, Tátlin, Ródtchenko and Maliévitch, who are creators that reflect, each one with their own art, the undeniable spirit of that time, of the socio-political transformations undergone by their internal and external worlds. A rare collection, from the largest collection of Russian art in the world, which has the approach and visions of Russian scholars themselves about an art and a time that are usually mediated only by the look of Western authors. There are 123 works – including paintings, posters, sculptures and costumes -, which put Brazilian visitors face to face for the first time with this revolutionary vanguard that helped lay the foundation for modern art in the twentieth century. Brasília 07.04 a 07.06.2009 – Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil Rio de Janeiro 23.06 a 23.08.2009 – Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil São Paulo 15.09 a 15.11.2009 – Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil Check[aqui] what was published about it. Technical Information Idea and Curatorship Yevgenia Petrova Joseph Kiblitsky Ania Rodríguez Rodolfo de Athayde General Coordination Rodolfo de Athayde Executive Production Ione Alves Daniela Camargo Production Assistant Lydia Rollemberg Yasmine Sefraoui Others Projects Kandinsky: Everything Starts From a Dot Wifredo Lam: The Spirit of Creation Visions on the Ludwig Collection Gustavo Acosta – Space of Silence To the sky, To the sky, To the sky,To the ground, To the ground, To the ground Favoretto: The Colors of My Corner 130 years of Khalil Gibran Watch me Move: The Animation Show Game On Richard Wright – This Other World Mirages – Contemporary Art in the Islamic world Carlos Garaicoa The Langsdorff Expedition Islam – Art and Civilization The Art of Cuba The Russian Turning
The Tension – Leandro Erlich
The exhibition ATensão brought together a set of 20 large-scale works that challenged the way we see the buildings of the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil: floating boats and elevators, windows to imaginary gardens, and even a pool where visitors can enter fully clothed and be submerged without fear of drowning were part of the show by one of the most provocative and popular names in contemporary art, Leandro Erlich. The name is quite explicit, ATensão (and phonetically ambiguous: those who don’t read it may hear “attention”), revealing one of the likely feelings that visitors experienced when faced with the artist’s installations. This is because Erlich works brings references that are literally “commonplaces,” spaces we are accustomed to see in our daily lives but displaced from their normal condition. Leandro Erlich’s work is structured around the mechanism of doubt. What our eyes see is at odds with what our minds know. Born in 1973 and producing his works in his studios in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, Erlich is constantly breaking the boundaries we normally believe exist between reality and illusion. An important example of this artistic illusionism was how he “made disappear” the tip of the Buenos Aires obelisk, a gigantic monument built in 1936 to commemorate the city’s 400th anniversary, which dominates the landscape near the Casa Rosada, the Argentine government’s headquarters, “relocating” this tip at the entrance of the Malba. However, more “universal” is the work “Swimming Pool,” which was installed in the courtyards of the CCBBs. A success wherever it is exhibited, Erlich’s pool is an installation where sensations are absurd for both those inside it – without getting wet – and for those outside: a layer of water between the outside and inside creates the illusion that the people in the background are actually immersed in a pool where they don’t need to breathe. According to the critic Hans Herzog, Erlich’s works can, in some way, be compared to Escher’s trompe-l’oeils. The amazement and surprise they instantly provoke “border on being slightly sinister,” Herzog states, making their ambiguity and absurdity evident. “Ultimately, Leandro Erlich’s installations turns against a hasty determination of the function and meaning of the objects that surround us – completely confusing our senses and making us reflect on what is reality and what is illusion.” Another critic, the Argentine Rodrigo Alonso, argued that Leandro Erlich’s work breaks with the automatism of our world by using resources such as “challenging gravity, inverting spaces, deceiving the gaze, turning the viewer into a voyeur, forcing perspectives, manipulating duplicity, instrumentalizing special effects, encouraging curiosity, turning the viewer into an actor, activating banal scenarios, disturbing mundane temporality, expanding spaces, opening windows to other realities, reinterpreting the everyday, suspending the definitions of true and false, building verisimilitude, provoking identification, and enhancing the unusual.” By displacing the viewer’s prior knowledge of what we could call, resorting to a commonplace in language, a “comfort zone,” Erlich necessarily places the viewer in confrontation with what their experience said about a given situation, demanding engagement and participatory attention to unravel each work. Belo Horizonte 15.09 a 22.11.21 – Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil Rio de Janeiro 5.01 a 07.03.22 – Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil São Paulo 13.04 a 20.06.22 – Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil Tour Virtual : A Tensão – Tour Technical Information Concept and Production Arte A Produções Curatorship Marcelo Dantas General Coordination Ania Rodriguez Rodolfo de Athayde Project Management Karen Ituarte Art Design Bete Esteves Lighting Adriana Milhomem Exhibition Layout Adriana Milhomem Finance Lisiany Mayão Exhibitions DreamWorks Animation: The Exhibition: – Journey from Sketch to Screen Alphonse Mucha – The legacy of Art Nouveau Urban Being – Carlos Garaicoa Dalí: The Divine Comedy Sensitive Constructions: The Latin-American Geometric Experience in the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection Los Carpinteros: Vital Object Lens of Memory – The Photography of Alberto de Sampaio V Edition of Baroque Music Festival of Alcantara The Tension – Leandro Erlich Ancestral Treasures of Peru
Ancestral Treasures of Peru
The exhibition “Ancient Treasures of Peru” consists of 162 pieces in ceramics, copper, gold, silver, and textiles, it is a journey through the ancient Andean civilizations up to the crystallization of the Inca Empire. Recognized as heritage by the Ministry of Culture of Peru, the rare collection of objects, that were found in various archaeological expeditions, belongs to the Mujica Gallo Foundation and is part of the catalog of the Museo Oro del Perú y Armas del Mundo. Curated by Patricia Arana and Rodolfo de Athayde, the exhibition was divided into five thematic blocks – Timeline, Mining, Deities and Rituals, Ceramics and Textiles, and Colonization – and presented to the public one of the most important collections in the history of civilizations. This exhibition stimulates an important debate about Latin American memory and its colonization processes. It offers an opportunity not only to appreciate the complexity of techniques and knowledge of the civilizations that inhabited the region but also to recognize the erasure of these people’s legacy due to the actions of colonizers. The 162 pieces were produced between 900 B.C. and 1600 A.D. Cultural traces of the Andean peoples are revealed in utensils such as depilators, bags, plumes, funerary masks, and crowns made of gold. There are also sections dedicated to ceramics and textile objects, such as jackets, caps, and shoes. The catalog also includes five Tumis, a type of ornamental knife used during animal sacrifice ceremonies and, in exceptional cases, human sacrifices. “The development of all these cultures reveals a remarkable historical accumulation of knowledge and mastery in various techniques and crafts, reflected in the elegance and complexity of the pieces that are presented. The skill in mining and crafting objects made of gold, silver, copper, and other minerals reaches an exceptional level of sophistication, even in the oldest civilizations,” explain the curators Rodolfo and Patricia. It is also noteworthy that these societies did not use money as an instrument of economic exchange, in contrast to the Europeans’ valuation of gold and silver accumulated as capital reserves. Each thematic block of the exhibition gathers a series of representations and informational panels that allow visitors to have a deeper understanding of the contents of the exhibition. The pieces in the exhibition are rare in many ways. Almost everything that existed in Inca territory was destroyed, stolen, or melted down. Later, it was also looted by robbers of archaeological monuments, known in Peru as huaqueiros, who rummaged through tombs and ceremonial centers in search of pieces to be sold illegally to collectors. The exhibition also brings interventions from contemporary artists, like the Peruvians Iván Sikic and Alexandra Grau, and the Brazilian Bete Esteves. Iván Sikic’s work, “Saqueo” (Pillage), references different moments in history where the compulsive extraction of gold caused significant cultural or ecological impacts. This installation questions the colonial legacy and the effects of illegal gold mining up to the present days. Alexandra Grau is responsible for the enormous recreations of colorful quipus, which allude to the instruments of records and accounting of the Incas. The different knots made in the cords create a language that preserves the history of this culture. The video art by Bete Esteves and Beth Franco uses images of mining techniques and metalworking to create a connection with the violent methods narrated by the protagonists. These contemporary art insertions offer a perspective that broadens the interpretation of the exhibition’s collection, providing a critical and reflective view on the representativeness of the pieces. Rio de Janeiro 11.10.23 a 05.02.24 Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil Belo Horizonte 27.02.24 a 06.05.24 Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil Brasília 27.05.24 a 11.08.24 Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil São Paulo 03.09.24 a 18.11.24 Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil Virtual tour of the exhibition Access the catalog: Click here Technical Information Production Arte A Produções Curatorship Patrícia Arana Rodolfo de Athayde General Coordination Rodolfo de Athayde Ania Rodriguez Museum Oro del Perú y Armas del Mundo Project Management Karen Ituarte Art Direction and Design Complexo B Bete Esteves Studio Baleia Bruno Pugens Exhibition layout and lighting Adriana Milhomem Production Assistant Daniele Oliveira Content Advisor and Research Ana Raquel Portugal Public Relations Agência Galo Exhibitions DreamWorks Animation: The Exhibition: – Journey from Sketch to Screen Alphonse Mucha – The legacy of Art Nouveau Urban Being – Carlos Garaicoa Dalí: The Divine Comedy Sensitive Constructions: The Latin-American Geometric Experience in the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection Los Carpinteros: Vital Object Lens of Memory – The Photography of Alberto de Sampaio V Edition of Baroque Music Festival of Alcantara The Tension – Leandro Erlich Ancestral Treasures of Peru