Brazilian Modernism confronted: curatorship as a clash of identity representations from the Northeast of Brazil

• Autor(a) principal: Lima, Pedro Ernesto Freitas
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Estudos Universitários (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.ufpe.br/revistas/index.php/estudosuniversitarios/article/view/254641
• topic: curatorship; contemporary art; identity representations; brazilian modernism; “Northeasternness”; curadoria; arte contemporânea; representações identitárias; modernismo; “Nordestinidade”

Art curatorship, through the handling of exhibitions and through the temporary arranging of art works, can question canons and hegemonic narratives, a strategy used to tension and question processes that invent and reproduce identity representations, many of them linked to the “Brazilianness” imagined by the modernism produced in São Paulo. Part of these representations were produced from certain alterities related to different regionalisms, including a certain “northeasternness”, which were operated mainly as an object of representation. Starting from an emblematic case of curatorship, in which canonical works of  Brazilian modernism are confronted with contemporary art works produced by black and mixed race artists that live outside the hegemonic Brazilian Southeast, we propose to discuss how a series of exhibitions held by Northeastern curators in the last two decades have questioned identity representations of “northeasternness” and its use as a construction of “authenticity” for “Brazilianness”. These curatorships deal with tensions regarding the power distribution, which legitimizes certain narratives at the expense of others; and with the curatorship’s ethical dimension when equating representation and representativeness.