Heritages of Now

FEMA Gallery – Cascais, 2024
Curated by Katia Canton

In her 2009 TED talk, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned about the dangers of accessing a unique story. There she spoke of how vulnerable we are in the face of a specific way, inevitably, the colonizing way, which is imposed on the colonized, of telling and building history.

Today, with crises that spread across the political, economic and socio-environmental issues that cross the world, attention turns to a review of these colonial narratives, seeking possibilities for other discourses, other constructions of the world and new ways of telling the multiple histories of art and human civilization.

In his book, After the End of Art—Contemporary Art and the Limits of History (1), the American philosopher Arthur Danto discusses precisely the replacement of a way of legitimizing art history, obedient to a modern Western logic, constructed by cis man , white, European, for a post-historical art, where multiple narratives coexist.

Instead of a chronological way of telling, marked by movements and isms, which until then made up a story that seemed to make sense to some, the contemporary moment alerts us to those who have been consistently excluded and who, nevertheless, constitute a form of excess. On the contrary. Works by women, Indigenous Peoples, africans and queer and trans people constitute a huge contingent of creation, which we are now beginning to review and be enchanted by.

For its inauguration, FEMA Gallery chose to exhibit works by Native Nations, attesting to the importance of this production that is the heritage of everything we are today.

This production is now in the spotlight with a way, or several ways, of telling the story where collectivities that have always produced and whose work sustained an entire civilization prevail.

It is important to think that the concept of original refers to that which contains ancestry and that exists prior to forms of colonization. Well, the works exhibited in the exhibition — the original art of the Brazilian Indigenous Peoples, the Australian aboriginal peoples, as well as the sculptural art of the Maasai people, who are in Kenya and northern Tanzania, the Biombo people, in Congo, the Asmat people , in Papua New Guinea and the production of the Sámi people, also called Lapps, in Scandinavia — form a constellation that makes us think about the very meaning of art’s existence. With this small but significant set of works, a thought is constructed about the meaning of art, aesthetics, and history.

From Brazil, we have works by Aislan Pankararu, Kaya Agari and Elisclésio da Silva. Born in Petrolina, Pernambuco, Aislan Pankararu lived in Brasília, where he graduated in medicine, and in 2019 he began to dedicate himself to drawing and painting, establishing himself as a self-taught artist. His work, paintings on canvas and drawings on kraft paper, are based on the motifs of the body drawings of the Pankararu people. His abstract constructions seem to have movement.

Kaya Agari, born in Cuiabá, Mato Grosso, works with graphisms inspired by the culture of her Kurâ Bakairi people, who inhabit lands located in the municipalities of Paranatinga and Nobres. She is an activist artist, dedicated to the fight for Indigenous rights.

Elisclésio da Silva, an artist from the Macuxi people, has a dreamlike, figurative style, in which an image overlaps or juxtaposes itself with others, forming layers of colorful drawings on a black background. Three canvases and two drawings by the artist reveal his layered way of thinking, in which beings, plants, animals and nature as a whole merge, as if they were part of the same organism, and separate simultaneously, from extremely poetic way.

It’s interesting to think about how the colors and pointillisms in the Brazilian’s work almost dissolve and move towards the three aboriginal canvases.

Aboriginal Australians use a complex and symbolic visual language in their paintings, which are known as rock art or dot art. The drawings, composed of points, lines and geometric shapes, have specific meanings and may vary according to the region and authorship. Much of the work speaks of a connection with the land, as well as with the spirituality and mythologies of its people. The paintings here are by women, made by Cindy Wallace Nungurrayi and Glenys Gibson Nungurrayi.

In the smaller room, on the left, a set of works by the Sámi artist Tomas Colbengtson highlights the presence of indigenous Scandinavian art. Colbengtson, an artist who was present in the Swedish pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, is an artist of denunciation.

Unlike most of the others presented, marked by a strong manuality, Colbengtson’s work has an evident conceptual nature. He uses polycarbonate plates, silkscreens and paints phrases on the images linked to the ideas he has about what it means to belong to original communities.

Among the three-dimensional works, an object from Papua New Guinea dialogues with a pair of African sculptures from the Maasai people and a beautiful dark wooden mask, whose inner orange part has its color thanks to tukula powder, a tree known as sandalwood. African.

In addition to works of art, this exhibition alludes to a human collection that reminds us of what is truest in the idea of a need to create in order to live. And it makes us think of history, not as a straight line, but as a rhizome, a complex universe of intertwined threads that never stop passing.

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(1) São Paulo: Edusp, 2006.
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*Katia Canton is a curator, writer, artist and psychoanalyst. She has a PhD in Interdisciplinary Arts from New York University, a professorship in Art Theory and Criticism and an associate professor in Aesthetics and Art History at the University of São Paulo.

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