20 artists in 2020

Agrippina R. Manhattan (São Gonçalo, 1996) is an artist, teacher and transvestite. She articulates art, education, curation and research as structuring parts of a poetic thinking, making relations between issues of the word, of art history, of the norm and emancipatory teaching postures. Manhattan has an elaborate thought around the relations between the self and the other in the formation of disputes and collaborations. She chose her name and invented herself, just like choosing a title for a work or translating what she feels into poetry.

Aleta Valente (Rio de Janeiro, 1986) is a visual artist and activist. We will not understand our times without understanding the uses of social media. Aware of this, the artist makes of Instagram a space for her work, giving a new meaning to the idea of selfie and problematizing the public consumption of the female body. She created the character / performer Ex-Miss Febem, which expresses political and aesthetic issues that emerge from feminist practice in images / photographs / memes posted on her profile.

Anna Costa e Silva (Rio de Janeiro, 1988) is a visual artist. She works around situations built between people, which propose reformulations of the social and affective tissues having the encounter as the main subject. Many of her works are based on designs or premises for non-ordinary relationships. Other flirt (even though they go quite far) with the idea of cinema or theater, counting on collaborations of actors, actresses and artists in general, and that may materialize or not into installations, films, sounds, or ephemeral situations, intertwining experience and memory.

Clara Moreira (Recife, 1984) is a visual artist. Her artistic research is developed through figurative drawing, employing meticulous technique with colored pencils, even in large formats, with rigorous details always in freehand. In these drawings, Clara researches the relationships between body, nature, dream, loneliness. Each piece seems to work like a verse of a poem that is elaborated through dilated time. She produced over sixty movie and film festival posters in the context of Brazilian independent cinema.

Daniel Jablonski (Rio de Janeiro, 1985) is a visual artist, professor and independent researcher. He moves freely between the academic environment and the field of visual arts. His works are long-term projects, in formats as varied as lectures or large installations, which test the limits of the research methodology in the artist’s daily life, in order to think freely about structuring issues of life in society, politics and also of affections. He currently coordinates the course “Histories of Modern and Contemporary Art” at Masp.

Davi de Jesus do Nascimento (Pirapora, 1997) is a visual artist. It is from the São Francisco River that comes the metaphysics that supports his production and that takes shape in drawings, experiences, performances, installations. He works collecting affections from his riverside ancestry and perceiving “quasi-rivers” in the desert. One of his main interests in the primary practice of painting is the earth. He uses the body as an instrument for measuring the world. He defines himself as a body-medium, confronted and confused with nature. “An aquatic, muddy and silent nature; which can be read as bait, fish and stone”.

Denilson Baniwa (Mariuá, 1984) is a visual artist of the Baniwa indigenous people, from Rio Negro, in the interior of the Amazonas state. In his youth, the artist began his journey towards the advocacy of indigenous peoples. Moving through non-indigenous society, Baniwa is an anthropophagous artist, as he appropriates Western icons to communicate the thinking and struggle of native peoples through various media and languages such as canvases, installations and performances. In his works, he intersects the indigenous universe and the latest technologies in a unique way.

Denise Ferreira da Silva (Rio de Janeiro, 1963) is a researcher and visual artist. With an extensive academic curriculum, she is currently director of the Institute of Social Justice at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her theoretical essays and artistic practice address the ethical issues of the global present and its metaphysical and epistemological basis in modern philosophy. Her work, with great international repercussion, deals with issues related to the ideas of race, nation, sexuality and difference in a world shaped by the legacy of colonialism and the global cataclysm.

Gokula Stoffel (Porto Alegre, 1988) is a visual artist. In her practice, Stoffel seeks to materialize mental images in order to investigate them in possible pictorial unfoldings into objects and space. She applies techniques from this medium to residual industrial materials, pieces of glass and various types of fabrics in order to create fragmented spatial collages. Her concern with the place and the function that the image occupies today is evident in paintings and sculptures that replicate the dynamics of the “scroll” of digital screens.

Guerreiro do Divino Amor (Geneva, 1983), based in Rio de Janeiro, is a visual artist with a master’s degree in architecture. His research explores Superficções [Superfictions], hidden forces that interfere in the construction of territory and collective imagination. The artist builds a universe of science fiction from fragments of reality, taking the form of films, publications and installations. Fiction and hyper-realism are mixed in an original interpretation, averse to “good taste”, about our dystopian present. Divino Amor uses exaggeration and absurdity to tension political, economic, media and religious powers.

Janaina Wagner (São Paulo, 1989) is a journalist and visual artist. She develops her research through several media, such as video, photography, books, drawing, installations, scenography and painting. She uses tools such as factual data verification, iconographic research, editing and decoupage to create audiovisual collages and narratives that mix a sociological bias with fantastic elements. She is currently a student at Le Fresnoy, one of the most interesting schools in France, with a specific focus on audiovisual experimentation and new media.

Jota Mombaça (Natal, 1991) is an essayist, artist and performer. Their writing influenced and keeps influencing a generation through the bluntness with which s/he creates concepts. Their work plays with the limits of humanity and monstrosity, deals with the importance of visionary fiction and the tensions between ethics, aesthetics, art and politics in the production of knowledge in the globalized South – pointing out that the anticolonial-decolonial struggle cannot be just another fashion, but a new ethical horizon. The artist will be one of the participants of the Sydney Biennial in 2020.

Juliana dos Santos (São Paulo, 1987) is a visual artist and art educator. With works in video, performance, photography and multimedia, Juliana investigates corporeality and Afro-Diasporic musicality. Her research takes place at the intersection of art, history and education, with an interest in the way black artists have engaged in abstract practices to deal with the limits of representation. She held her first solo show in 2018, as a guest artist / teacher at the artistic residency of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and will be at the next “Abre alas”, an important annual exhibition by A Gentil Carioca gallery.

Linga Acácio (Fortaleza, 1985) is a researcher, visual artist and filmmaker. Since 2012, s/he has worked as a cinematographer in feature and short films. Their research is contaminated with performance and gender dissent and the implications between body and space in the processes of anti-colonial resistance. Acácio often draws from their native Fortaleza to develop projects in various media that deal with the issue of living in contexts and territories under transformation. An interesting case of formally and politically powerful work.

Manoela Medeiros (Rio de Janeiro, 1991) is a visual artist. Her research uses different media – mainly sculpture, painting, performance and installations, which articulate relations between language, nature and ruins. Manoela creates displacements in spaces, materialization of cycles and ecosystems, construction of a complex reality within which the distinction between nature and culture disappears. In a production that goes against the spectacular, the artist makes use of architecture to address other relationships with space and time.

Marcela Cantuária (Rio de Janeiro, 1991) is a visual artist. She makes use of images from different backgrounds, seeking to create points of contact between temporalities and the imaginary about female figures and political protagonism. Considering a feminist, socialist and magical perspective, her compositions seek to give visibility to a range of characters and narratives historically stifled by so-called official narratives, with special interest in what happens in Latin American latitudes.

Rafael Bqueer (Belém, 1992) is an artist, educator and carnavalesco. He moves through languages such as performance, video, photography, among other practices based on investigations around: political art and intersectionality, decoloniality, gender and activism as a Drag Queen in LGBTQI+ nightclubs. His work investigates how the different forms of body presence can establish disturbances in the political dimension, that is, in the dimension of the dispute or negotiation of reality. This year, the artist holds his first individual exhibition at an institution, at the Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR).

Emerson Munduruku (Santarém, 1991) is a biologist with a master’s degree in ecology, art educator and visual artist. He is an advocate for LGBTQI + and indigenous rights. He resides in Manaus, an industrial territory in the middle of Central Amazon, where the drag monster Uýra Sodoma lives, an entity in the flesh of animal and plant. Through organic materials in makeup and costumes, she embodies “The tree that walks”. In photographs of the characterizations and performances, s/he denounces the violence against living systems and (re)tells stories of enchantment existing in the city-forest landscape.

Ventura Profana (Salvador, 1993) is a composer, writer and visual artist. Indoctrinated in Baptist temples, the artist also presents herself as a missionary pastor and evangelist singer, who prophesies the multiplication and abundance of black and transvestite life. Her reinterpretations of biblical narratives, which have historically been appropriated by political projects of population whitening and concentration of power, question the implications of deuteronomism in Brazil through the spread of neo-Pentecostal churches. Ventura was one of the participants in the last edition of the Bolsa Pampulha program (2019).

Yuli Yamagata (São Paulo, 1989) is a visual artist. She essentially works with sewing and draws from ordinary fabrics found in haberdasheries and popular stores to build a very peculiar and authentic visual universe. Direction reversal and displacement operations are common in her work. Yamagata mixes with fluency and humor references as diverse as the Bauhaus design and the vibrantly colored lycra clothes of crossfit practitioners.