"New media art practices from Brazil and Peru"
Curators's Intentions
The starting point of this exhibition is to show what the Brazilian and Peruvian contexts, in their cultural, social, and political aspects, have in common regarding the use of media technologies. It explores how these aspects are reflected in representative new media art practices and works from both countries. The common issues in these specific contexts could be explained or made visible in a dynamic of dualities, paradoxes and a superimposition of different worlds, which built on idiosyncrasies to reveal new perspectives on present times. These new points of view from South American media artists present a wide range of challenges to the ‘straightforward’ paths into the globalized world.
Brazil’s and Peru’s particular modernisms are marked by various parallels in their extravagant and creative precariousness, in the mass technological improvisation and complex temporal layers of their chaotic, violent and brutal cities, in their histories and memories.
Lima, the capital of Peru, represents a new paradigm of modernity that is, however, marked by paradox: chaos, poverty, mass access to technology, pirated technological products, historical buildings recycled into modern ones. All the signs of Peru’s socio-economic complexity are concentrated in this situation. São Paulo is Brazil’s financial and business centre, a place where extreme situations of poverty and wealth co-exist. What the two cities seem to have in common, and which is reflected in many works in this exhibition, is the coexistence of paradoxical situations in which the forces of modernity and precariousness are constantly at play.
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Julie Bélisle (Montreal)
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Kiki Mazzucchelli (São Paulo)
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Miguel Zegarra (Lima)