“Challenging the impossible”: the motto of the São Paulo Biennial for the next three months

The 35th edition of this contemporary art exhibition, the second oldest of its kind after the one in Venice, opens today in charge of a team in which no one is the boss

“How are the impossibilities of our daily lives reflected in artistic production?” That question inspires the 35th edition of the São Paulo Biennale, the second oldest in the world after Venice and the most important contemporary art exhibition in the southern hemisphere, which opens today to the public with free admission and will run for the next three months. Under the title “Choreographies of the Impossible”, it exhibits some 1,100 works made by 121 participants in the 30,000 square meters of the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in Ibirapuera Park.

“Our goal was to create an edition without limiting categories or structures,” says the curatorial team made up of Brazilians Diane Lima, Hélio Menezes, Grada Kilomba from Portugal and Manuel Borja-Villel from Spain, former director of the Museo Reina Sofía. Unlike previous editions, the four decided to adopt "a decentralized system" in which hierarchical structures are dissolved and no one acts as boss.

“The participants in this biennial defy the impossible in its most varied and incalculable forms,” they explain. They live in impossible contexts, where strategies of avoidance, crossing of limits and escape from the impossibilities of the world in which they live are developed. They deal with violence, the impossibility of fully living freedom, inequalities; their artistic expressions are transformed by the impossibility of our time”.

The extensive list of artists "who transcend the idea of a progressive and linear Western time" includes the renowned Arthur Bispo do Rosário (Brazil), Daniel Lind-Ramos (Puerto Rico) -both with recent exhibitions in New York- and Wifredo Lam (Cuba). Two important works by the latter, (La mañana verde and Omi Obini, from 1943), were lent by Malba and by its founder, Eduardo Costantini, who traveled especially for the inauguration after having received the Arteba Collecting Award in Buenos Aires.

Although Argentina is represented in the biennial only by the late artist Elda Cerrato, other exhibitions housed in important institutions in one of the most populated cities in the world feature Marta Minujín (in the Pinacoteca de São Paulo), Marcelo Brodsky (at the Judaic Museum) and dozens of members of the Alec Oxenford Federal Contemporary Art Collection (at the Tomie Ohtake Institute).
The inauguration in this important space, whose chief curator is Paulo Miyada -also assistant curator for Latin America at the Pompidou Center-, was attended by, among others, the Argentines Inés Katzenstein, curator of Latin American Art at MoMA, and Teresa Bulgheroni, president of the Malba Foundation .
After its debut on Brazilian soil last year, at the Niterói Museum of Contemporary Art, this second chapter of Un lento venir veniendo includes 71 works by 48 artists from the Oxenford Collection, selected by Mariano Mayer. In tune with the theme that inspires the biennial, this exhibition also invites, according to its curator, “to think about what is a copy, what is art, what are their points of contact, their possibilities and impossibilities”.

To schedule:
35th edition of the São Paulo Biennial: choreographies of the impossible in the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, in Ibirapuera Park, Brazil. From September 6 to December 10. Free pass.

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