São Paulo Biennale Announces Title and Theme

Fundação Bienal de São Paulo releases the first curatorial text written by the collective of Diane Lima, Grada Kilomba, Hélio Menezes and Manuel Borja-Villel announcing the title and theme of the 35th Bienal de São Paulo – choreographies of the impossible, which will take place in September to December 2023.

How can bodies in movement be able to choreograph the possible, within the impossible? The proposal for the 35th Bienal de São Paulo emerges as a mutual project around multiple possibilities to choreograph the impossible. As the title already suggests, it is an invitation to radical imaginations about the unknown, or even about what figures as im/possible.
We employ the term choreography to highlight the practice of drawing sequences of movements across time and space, generating multiple and new fractions, forms, images and possibilities, despite all the infeasibility and denial. We are interested in the rhythms, tools, strategies, and technologies, as well as in all symbolic, economic and juridical procedures that extra-disciplinary knowledges are able to promote, producing thus the flight, the refusal and their poetic exercises.

Read the full curatorial statement here.

The idea of forming a group with a horizontal structure, without the figure of a chief curator, was suggested by the team of curators and will be central to their project for the 35th Bienal.

Founded in 1962, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo is a non-profit private institution with no political or religious affiliations, whose actions aim to democratize access to culture and stimulate interest in artistic creation. Every two years Fundação Bienal organizes the Bienal de São Paulo, the largest art exhibition in the Southern Hemisphere, and its traveling exhibitions in several cities in Brazil and abroad. The institution is also the guardian of two artistic and cultural heritages in Latin America: a historical archive of modern and contemporary art that is a reference in Latin America (Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo), and the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, the Foundation’s headquarters, designed by Oscar Niemeyer, listed by the National Historic and Artistic Heritage Institute. The Fundação Bienal de São Paulo is also responsible for the task of idealizing and producing Brazilian representations at the Venice Biennales of art and architecture, a prerogative granted decades ago by the Federal Government in recognition of the excellence of its contributions to the culture of Brazil.

bienal.org.br