Curator of Solo in 2019, Chilean Alexia Tala returns to the sector for SP-Arte 16th edition

Please note: SP-Arte 2020 has been suspended due to force majeure. Soon, find out more about the São Paulo International Art Festival 17th edition.

While in the 2019 edition of SP-Arte Solo Sector curator Alexia Tala’s goal was to reflect upon the impacts of colonialism on the multiple identities of Latin America, this year, amid crises in the region, the Chilean advances in the debate and proposes a new look at the history of domination over the continent. Titled “Camadas de tempo” [Slices of Time], this edition of the Solo project seeks to reflect on how mid-20th century events and concepts affected the stability and autonomy of this part of the Global South.

“If we try to represent the reality of this slice of time that is the turn of the century, as Giorgio Agamben puts it, we will see that we live in a present fractured by contemporaneity and, starting from our place as a problematic geographical-cultural point, we meet contemporary artists that explore the fractures of our time through creative processes that address multiple local realities, offering diverse ways of reading for different contexts and stories”, claims the curator’s critical text.

Starting from the presentation of contemporary artists from Latin America, Tala also seeks to demystify the historiography of traditional art, thus reflecting on the construction of our history and identity in contemporaneity. With booths from Latin American galleries, Solo is one of the curated sectors of SP-Arte – São Paulo International Art Festival, whose 16^th edition takes place from 1^st to 5^th April, at the Bienal Pavilion, Ibirapuera Park.

The curator

Independent curator and artistic director of Plataforma Atacama, Alexia Tala specializes in Latin American arts research. More recently, she is focused on Arte Paiz Biennial 2020 (Guatemala) curatorial project and on the publication of the monograph of Chilean Lotty Rosenfeld’s. Alexia was co-curator of the 8^th Mercosur Biennial – Geopoetic Essays and the 4^th San Juan de Poly/graphic Triennial of Porto Rico, at the 20^th Guatemalan Paiz Art Biennial. She also writes for a number of arts publications both in Latin America and the United Kingdom and is the author of “Installations and Experimental Printmaking” (UK, 2009). She was responsible for the last edition of SP-Arte’s Solo sector, in 2019.

Solo Sector

Created in 2014, Solo is dedicated to the exhibition of curatorial projects focused on a single artist. More than fifty national and international galleries have participated in the sector in recent years, including Blank (South Africa), Casa Riegner (Colombia), Elba Benítez (Spain), Fragment (Russia), Nara Roesler (Brazil), Richard Saltoun (England) and Ruth Benzacar (Argentina).