The Mercosul Biennial Foundation announced the list of artists and cultural spaces that will host the exhibition next year.
The main objective of the exhibition’s curatorial concept is to deal with the notion of transformation. In the blink of an eye and in a brief fragment of time, our bodies and nature, for example, undergo transformations of varying magnitudes. From the metamorphoses that silently emerge in our organisms to sudden and noisy movements – living is synonymous with never being in a stable and safe place. For 66 days, the biennial will spread throughout the city, bringing together works by 76 artists from different regions of the world, believing in exchanges between different social contexts and artistic languages to approach the diversity of experiences between art and life.
Over two years of work, the artistic team led by chief curator Raphael Fonseca, in addition to adjunct curators Tiago Sant’Ana and Yina Jimenez Suriel and assistant curator Fernanda Medeiros, designed a program of exhibitions and activities that bring to the city of Porto Alegre a great diversity of works, interests and world views suggested by the artists gathered. These artistic projects reflect their geographic and cultural contexts in a field ranging from an interest in abstraction to more documentary projects. This zigzag of different artistic poetics interests this edition of the Biennial.
The 14th Mercosul Biennial aims to reach a larger and more diverse audience – investing in bringing art closer to local and global audiences. This fact is also evident in the list of artists, which has a considerable presence of representatives from Latin America and Asia. Of the 76 artists that make up the exhibition, around 65% are international artists, and most of the works are commissioned.
In addition to being present in institutions that have been a regular part of the Biennial’s history, such as Farol Santander, the Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul (MARGS), and Usina do Gasômetro, this edition is characterized by being present in other regions of the city, such as the Lomba do Pinheiro and Restinga neighborhoods, in the Estação Cidadania units, and also, for the first time, at Cinemateca Capitólio, Pop Center, Museu do Hip Hop and Fundação Vera Chaves Barcellos, in Viamão. In this way, the event is believed to expand and form a new audience in the Greater Porto Alegre region.
Raphael Fonseca reiterates the Biennial’s vocation to establish connections with different geographies: “Porto Alegre and the state of Rio Grande do Sul are multicultural spaces with many layers of cultural and historical complexity. It is fair that an edition of the Mercosul Biennial can also, within the limits of any major event dedicated to the visual arts, reflect this diversity and contribute to a greater knowledge of such interesting artists by a broad audience,” says the chief curator.
