On the occasion of the exhibition "Lygia Pape. The Skin of ALL" (Mar 19 – Jul 17, 2022), the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen invites you to a symposium that will address the question of what role art plays under dictatorship, but also what power and socio-political responsibility artists and museums bear in this context. Can art in times of dictatorship or war be separated from politics at all?

Brazil, 1964. Supported by the US, a military coup established a dictatorship that lasted for 21 years. During this period many people, including artists and teachers, were persecuted, censored, tortured and murdered; several cultural movements interrupted. In exile or not, cultural practitioners oriented their works more strongly than before to political and social circumstances. While Lygia Pape stayed in Brazil and radically changed her practice, her biggest interlocutor, the art critic Mario Pedrosa, was forced into exile and went to Chile. There, he played a fundamental role in the creation of the Museum of Solidarity during the government of Salvador Allende (1970-1973).

The symposium "Stories of Resistance in South America," featuring talks by the sociologist, writer, and curator María Berríos and the researcher, critic, and curator Marcelo Rezende, followed by a panel discussion with the scholar, writer, and curator Luiza Proença and the curator of the Lygia Pape exhibition Isabelle Malz, will recall some of these stories of resistance in South America; the role of popular culture and struggle; and the possibilities of solidary alliances through art today.

Guests
María Berríos is a sociologist, writer, independent curator, and cofounder of the Chilean editorial collective vaticanochico. Her work traverses art, culture, and politics with a special interest in the collective experiments of the Third World movement and their exhibition formats in the 1960s and 70s. She teaches and lectures regularly in Europe and Latin America and has published extensively on art and politics in Latin America and beyond. Among other projects she curated in international institutions in Chile, Mexico, Sāo Paolo, Copenhagen she was part of the curatorial team of the 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2020).

Luiza Proença is a transdisciplinary researcher, writer and curator. Currently, she is a societal/communal-based work fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. She was a curator at the São Paulo Art Museum and at the 31st São Paulo Biennial, and editor of publications of the 9th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, among other institutions. From 2017 to 2019, she worked as curatorial researcher for bauhaus imaginista at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin and Sesc Pompeia, São Paulo.

Marcelo Rezende is a researcher, critic and exhibition-maker. He was director of the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia (2012–2015), artistic director of the 3rd Bahia Biennial (2014), part of the curatorial group of the 28th São Paulo Biennial (2008), and curator of the exhibition "Kaffee aus Helvecia" (2017) at the Johann Jacobs Museum (Zürich), amongst other projects and occupations. From 2017 to 2022, Rezende had the position of co-director of the Archive der Avantgarden (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden).

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Date:
June 25 , 3 – 6 pm

Free admission

Anmeldung erforderlich.