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17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil Announces New Publications

Two publications finish off Associação Cultural Videobrasil’s activities in partnership with SESC in 2011: Olafur Eliasson – Your body of work, the first Brazilian book on the artist, and the new edition of annual contemporary art reflection publication Caderno SESC_Videobrasil 7 – A Revista (The magazine). The book and magazine will hit Brazilian stores and the SESC virtual bookstore (www.lojasescsp.org.br) in December, in bilingual editions.

A collaboration between Videobrasil, SESC, and Studio Olafur Eliasson, Olafur Eliasson – Your body of work (Edições SESC, 488 pages) was conceived as part of the artist’s show of the same title, brought to São Paulo by the 17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil. The book features pictures of works and records of experiments made by Eliasson in the streets of São Paulo, as part of his process to establish closer ties with the city.

The exhibition, which will run until January at SESC Belenzinho, SESC Pompeia, and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, has already been visited by over 280,000 people. Curated by Jochen Volz, the artistic director of Instituto Inhotim (MG), it provides a comprehensive introduction to Eliasson’s production, featuring ten installations that invite the audience to experiment with their perception of space.

In addition to texts by scholars such as Lisette Lagnado and Guilherme Wisnik, who relate the artist’s oeuvre to contemporary Brazilian manifestations in fields such as art and architecture, the book features an interview with Eliasson as well as pictures of Your new bike, an installation of twelve bicycles throughout São Paulo, their wheels replaced with mirrors, as part of an ongoing project initiated in Berlin in 2009.

This publication is part of the exhibition rather than merely a record of it. It is a portrait of Eliasson’s approach to São Paulo and includes several photographs of heavy rainfalls, lamp shops on Rua da Consolação, and public buildings in São Paulo “that captured Eliasson’s interest with their radical concrete architecture housing schools, museums, and community centers,” says Jochen Volz, who has also organized the book. “There are also photographs of Eliasson’s mirror experiments in the street. These series are not documentary in character, but, rather, result from the artist’s investigation of the city and the way it is perceived and contextualized, which he uses as a matrix for the development of his work.”

Caderno SESC_Videobrasil 7 – A Revista

Edited by the curator Rodrigo Moura, the seventh edition of Caderno SESC_Videobrasil, A Revista (Edições SESC; 144 pages) comprises excerpts from Brazilian art and culture magazines dating from the 1920s to the 1990s, in addition to works by artists and writers who comment on said publishing format. The magazine was designed by artist Marilá Dardot.

Faced with the rapidly changing media scenario, the seventh edition of the Caderno sets out to revisit the symbolical and physical character of magazines, not to reaffirm it as much as to deconstruct it and test its limits.

Caderno 7 borrows its title from the famous Minas Gerais-based publication A Revista, founded in 1930 by Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Emílio Moura. In cut-outs from magazines that played an important role in carving out a territory for art in Brazil, such as GAM, Módulo, and Arte em Revista, works by Hélio Oiticica, Lina Bo Bardi, and Nelson Leirner reemerge, among others.

Nine collaborators were invited to create projects specifically for the publication: Arnaldo Antunes, Rivane Neuenschwander, Fabio Morais, Jorge Macchi, Claudia Andujar, Ana Martins Marques, Cildo Meireles, Eduardo Costa, and Erika Verzutti. Pages, news, and typical magazine and newspaper formats inspire a significant share of the collaborations.

“The idea of establishing relationships between these artists’ oeuvres and the media revisited, and of combining written and visual language to create an exhibition of sorts throughout the pages of the publication, is what motivates the invitations,” explains Rodrigo Moura. An editor and art critic, Moura has been the curator of Instituto Inhotim (MG) since 2004.

Caderno SESC_Videobrasil is an annual publication dedicated to in-depth reflection on contemporary art production. Past editions have tackled the resurgence of performance art (2005); the impact of the contemporary experience of mobility (2006); experimentalism in audiovisual production (2007); space occupation strategies (2008); the feminine and feminism in art and life (2009); and contemporary power and influence relationships (2010).

Caderno SESC_Videobrasil 7 will be presented and launched during the last panel of the Southern Panoramas Seminars, Editorial Intentions: Who Reads and Who Writes, What For, on Saturday, December 10, 2:00 p.m. through 6:00 p.m., at SESC Belenzinho’s Concert Room 2. Further information: www.sescsp.org.br/17Festival

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