São Paulo Bienal 2023 to Choreograph the Impossible
The curators want to create space for ‘radical imaginations about the unknown’ with contributions from artists including Julien Creuzet, Ellen Gallagher, and Torkwase Dyson. Save to My Ocula
The São Paulo Bienal has revealed almost half of the 100 artists participating in its 35th edition from 6 September to 10 December 2023.
They include Pace Gallery artist Torkwase Dyson, Gagosian‘s Ellen Gallagher, and Julien Creuzet, who shows at Andrew Kreps Gallery and will represent France at the Venice Biennale in 2024.
Forty-three artists have been named so far, with the remainder to be announced in June. Over three-quarters come from the Global South, and 92 percent are black, indigenous, or non-white.
The biennial, titled Choreographies of the Impossible, is being curated by Diane Lima, Grada Kilomba, Hélio Menezes, and Manuel Borja-Villel.
They said their choice of the term choreography ‘helps us reflect on how the idea of moving freely remains at the core of a neoliberal conception of freedom.’
Instead, they said they wanted to ‘make room for a continuous dance which we can choreograph together, even in difference.’
Asked for examples of how artists might dance together against the excesses of free market freedom, Diane Lima suggested Frente 3 de Fevereiro, a Brazilian collective whose works include enlisting football fans to display 20 x 15 metre flags with slogans against racial discrimination and police violence.
She also mentioned the work of French filmmaker Sarah Maldoror (1929–2020), who used filmmaking to support liberation and independence movements in African countries, especially Angola.
‘Sarah said that making a film is taking a stand,’ Lima said.
Thirdly, she offered up the practice of Inaicyra Falcão, a Brazilian singer commissioned to create an album for the Bienal whose work serves to ‘deepen collective listening and to collectivise choreographic processes, building an archeology of spinning that is found in voice, her own dance.’
Other artists participating in the exhibition include Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Dayanita Singh, Geraldine Javier, Igshaan Adams, Rosana Paulino, and Wilfredo Lam.
The full list of artists announced so far can be found on the São Paulo Bienal website. —[O]
Main image: Denilson Baniwa, Jaguar-Shaman Hacking the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, 2018. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Zedu Moreau.
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