Tu m’ouvres tes bras et on fait un pays

Tomorrow, October 15^th, is the opening of the exhibition Tu m’ouvres tes bras et on fait un pays : Brésil, corps et démocratie at the Galerie Ilian Rebei in Paris. The exhibition coincides with this electoral period in Brazil and bring together Brazilian artists from different generations that research the theme of the body and politics. The works of these artists reflected on their own relationship to the politic situation in Brazil.

Understanding the exhibition

The research derives from the possibilities and impossibilities implicit in three specific terms: Brazil, body, and democracy. The year of 1968 is the starting point of the exhibition, since it was a pivotal year of the political history of Brazil, with popular manifestations of students and workers, it was also the year of AI-5 (Unconstitutional Act number 5), which served to institutionalise the practices of torture, censorship, and repression of the generals. It is the fifth of seventeen major decrees issued by the military dictatorship in the years that follow the 1964’s Coup d’État in Brazil.

From this starting point, the exhibition bring together works from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and continues towards the contemporary through a history of struggle for freedom and for the recognition of a democratic state. Brazilian democracy has been affirmed only in the decade of the 1980s, when the current Constitution was written (1988) in reaction to the period of military dictatorship, and that sought to guarantee individual rights at the same time that restrict the ability of the state to limit liberty, punish crimes and regulate individual life.

The exhibition tries to not limit the discourse and the concept of democracy that we have from Theodor Adorno, and confront with the malleability of the words, the idea of body in itself can be questioned through the feminist and queer “poetics” of the works selected to the exhibition. The main objective of the exhibition is to bring to the European public a more complex vision of Brazilian contemporary art while making it more attractive.

According to the curatorial project of the exhibition, it disobeys some prejudices about Latin American art, by inscribing Brazil in its national history while intertwining the aesthetic productions in a larger context: the urgency of the transformation of biopolitical technologies that produce bodies and sexualities, constructed by the patriarchal and colonial capitalist history.

Among the artists we can find the work of several women artists such as Anitta Boa Vida, Anna Bella Geiger, Nídia Aranha, Anna Maria Maiolino, Bárbara Wagner, Cinthia Marcelle, etc. The curatorship of the exhibition is by Ulisses Carrilho.

The opening of the exhibition Tu m’ouvres tes bras et on fait un pays : Brésil, corps et démocratie is tomorrow, October 15^th, at the Galerie Ilian Rebei in Paris. And it can be visited until December 18^th.  

All the information and images were kindly provided by the Galerie Ilian Rebei.