Events

Our March talks focus on the significance of Brazil's Modernism. Not only has Brazil staked out a prominent position in the global contemporary art market, with artists from Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica to Cildo Meireles and Ernesto Neto achieving international recognition, the country's art and architecture have also played a significant role in re-readings of the history of modern art, and emerged as significant subjects for artists working outside its borders. Brazil's significant modernist projects - exemplified on the one hand by architectural landmarks (such as Niemeyer's pavilion for the São Paulo Bienal and the capital of Brasília), and on the other by the Concrete and Neoconcrete movements - have come to embody an alternative reading of modernism and become alluring to European and North American artists working in a range of media, but particularly sculpture and photography, including Luisa Lambri, Nathan Coley, Mike Nelson and Candida Hoefer.

8 March 06: Art critic and curator Chantal Pontbriand is founder-editor of Parachute, the contemporary art magazine, which recently published a special edition on São Paolo as a 'city of emergence'. Proposing Brazil as one of the tectonic plates of the cultural world, her talk will focus on the influence of Brazilian artists across the last fifty years, outlining similarities and differences in approaches between different generations.

15 March 06: Italian artist Luisa Lambri sees 'architecture as biography', and creates photographs and videos of empty modernist buildings. In 2003 she travelled to Brazil and photographed the Palácio das Indústrias, Oscar Niemeyer’s modernist landmark designed for the São Paolo Bienal. In these haunting images, one of which is featured in the exhibition, the Brazilian jungle is held in fragile abeyance by rigidly-geometric windowpanes. Her talk will focus on her experiences of Brazil and what drew her to Niemeyer’s architecture.

22 March 06: Tonico Lemos Auad is a Brazilian artist based in London, currently working on projects in Brazil, New York and Europe. His previous exhibitions include the Beck's Prize in 2004 at the ICA in London and the Yokohama Triennial in Japan in 2005, and his work is currently touring in The British Art Show 06. His talk will focus on how his work reflects his personal response to site-specific projects in Brazil and abroad.

29 March 06: Art historian Anna Dezeuze is research fellow in Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. Her research interests include 1960s North and South American art, with a particular focus on Brazilian sculpture. She is currently working on a new book provisionally titled The Almost Nothing: Dematerialisation and the Politics of Precariousness. Her talk will examine the relations between Brazilian Neoconcretism and American Minimalism in the 1960s, focusing on issues of objecthood and spectator participation.

Audio recordings of Chantal Pontbriand and Tonico Lemos Auad's talks are available in the Henry Moore Institute Research Library.