Ernesto Neto, collection: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.

Museum Boijmans
Van Beuningen
with Netherlands Architecture Institute
and Netherlands Fotomuseum
Museumpark 18-20
+31 (0)10 44.19.400
Rotterdam
Brazil Contemporary
May 30-August 23, 2009

Brazil is inspiring, astounding, amazing. It is one of the largest countries in the world, with vast cities of millions of inhabitants that defy the imagination. Brazil is also developing at breakneck speed and is one of the economic giants of the future. But Brazil has its downside too: the depletion of the rainforest, the enormous contrast between rich and poor, the favelas. These phenomena are culturally reflected in an exciting cocktail of high and low art, of street art and politically committed art, and of different art disciplines and traditional craftsmanship. Brazilian culture will go to your head.

After the success of China Contemporary (2006), the three museums have decided to join forces again to focus on a country that has emerged as a global player in economic, social and cultural terms within a short period. Brazil Contemporary presents a broad panorama of Brazilian culture and introduces the public to young Brazilian artists, architects and designers.

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Netherlands Architecture Institute, and Nederlands Fotomuseum, present a dazzling survey of the contemporary art of Brazil. The work of Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980) occupies pride of place. Oiticica considered that Brazil should not just passively undergo and imitate Western influences, but that artists should transmute these influences into a uniquely Brazilian culture. The exhibition shows to what extent today’s artists are still under the influence of Oiticica, with works by Ernesto Neto, Rivane Neuenschwander, Cao Guimaraes and Ricardo Basbaum.

Brazilian contemporary art is intimately, possibly inevitably, bound up with its past. Helio Oiticica (1937-1980) was one of the most influential artists to emerge from Brazil's highly pluralistic history. With Brazil Contemporary Museum Boijmans Van Boijmans exhibits work of Brazilian artists today with a selection of Oiticica's Bólides (or 'fireballs'), a series of painted boxes and glass containers. All works employ a vigorous visual language, bright palette and distinctive form vocabulary.

Among Oiticica's achievements was the original and uncompromising use of colour that was central to his practice. In the 1960s Oiticica developed Bólides (or 'fireballs'). The bólides displays invite the public's interaction and speak directly to the viewer, exciting all the senses.

Rivane Neuenschwander produces works across a variety of media, and with highly varied content. Seeing, hearing, smelling and feeling are key aspects of her work. She produces installations, works on paper, photographs and films. Neuenschwander has made (game) installations that invite the public's participation and, taking confetti as her material, a work in which ventilators create clouds of paper snippets which finally come to rest on the ceiling.

Celebrated filmmaker Cao Guimaraes makes films and videos that hover between cinema, fine art and documentary. He has won prizes at numerous film festivals. Guimaraes makes extraordinary videos with a road movie feel, or detailed observations of a spontaneous incident on a street corner. In Drifter (2007) Guimaraes follows the daily wanderings of three vagrants. The mundane threads of their days gradually begin to overlap.

Using nylon, Ernesto Neto makes soft, bio-morphic sculptures with a strong sensual presence that challenge viewers to ‘crawl into the work'. Large-scale, finely detailed constructions. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen has previously purchased a room-sized installation by the artist.

The artist, writer and choreographer Ricardo Basbaum examines human communications in his three-dimensional installations. His drawings show the patterns that occur during interpersonal interaction. Basbaum deconstructs a dance step in mathematical codes that serve as a manual for human communications.

Netherlands Architecture Institute
Museumpark 25 3015 CB
+31(0)10-4401200
Rotterdam

The Netherlands Architecture Institute introduces the public to one of the biggest cities in the world: São Paulo. With its melting pot of cultures and identities, São Paulo is the reflection of contemporary Brazil. The exhibition introduces visitors to the mind-boggling size, the social structures and the cohesive forces of this metropolis. There are three intertwining narrative threads. First is the story of a vast city with millions of inhabitants. Then there is the story about life in the city — neighbourhoods, communities and well-known architecture projects by Oscar Niemeyer, Lina Bo Bardi, Paulo Mendes da Rocha and others. And finally there is the story of the Paulistanos, the residents of São Paulo, and their dreams for the city. 30 May to 23 August 2009.

Today, around 50 percent of the world's population lives in urban areas, and the number of city dwellers is expected to increase in the future. The Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) introduces the public to one of the four largest metropolitan regions in the world: São Paulo.

The NAi asked architects, urban planners and the residents of São Paulo to reflect on their dreams for the city.  Those of us living in the Netherlands can ask ourselves the same question. How do we manage our cities, our deprived areas and our public space? Rotterdam and the Netherlands can learn a great deal from São Paulo. The big question is what we, in the densely populated Netherlands, can learn from the example of this vast, dynamic city.

Scenes of the city and its inhabitants, filmed by students of the São Paulo film school, comprise the heart of the exhibition. Surrounded by different video screens, visitors are plunged into the almost unimaginably fast-paced life of the city; tumultuous but irresistibly exciting. The NAi presents five cross-cuts of São Paulo; from the heart of the city to the periphery.

The "old city" and original São Paulo, built in the valley by Jesuits as a missionary post. The city boomed after 1890 as the coffee trade grew, immigrants from all over the world poured in and industrialisation arrived.

The Railway zone reflects São Paulo's past as an economic giant. In the 19th century, the railway connected the harbour and city and was the lifeline of the lucrative coffee trade. The early 1920s marked the city's transformation into a city of industry. Today, many factories have relocated out of the city and the areas around the rail line are largely abandoned. The heart of the city now has a gaping hole. São Paulo's government is attempting to heal these "wounds" with "archipuncture" (architectural acupuncture). New cultural functions are being introduced to the zone in the hope of bringing regeneration.

Built on the highest elevation in the city, Avenida Paulista is at the hub of the metropolis' wealth and power. It is a utopia: the concrete dream of how Brazil should be. It is the city that has it all: lush landscaped parks, spectacular museums and scintillating nightlife. This is the image channelled by the media to the world. Avenida Paulista is São Paulo's business card.

The City of the Multinationals is an area utside the centre, along the freeway. Where slums once clustered, the land has been cleared to make way for business centres. Now, colossal office complexes of multinationals are cheek by jowl with gigantic shopping malls. Residents feel safe in these closed communities.

In the Estrada de Itapacerica (the Do-It-Yourself City), an informal urban zone, it is the residents who design and build the city. Here, too, the state maintains its distance. The favelas — slums — and poorer districts form a cordon around the city interrupted now and then by "gated communities" with luxury villas, tall fencing and round-the-clock security. For the inhabitants life is mainly a question of survival, and they go about it with terrific verve and creativity. Despite Estrada de Itapacerica's reputation as a brutish violent neighbourhood, it is a closely-knit community that places great value on human dignity.

Nederlands Fotomuseum
Las Palmas Building
Wilhelminakade 332
+31 (0)10-2030405
Rotterdam

The Netherlands Fotomuseum zooms in on the rapidly changing Brazilian visual culture with its mixture of high and low, élitist and populist, artistic and applied. The exhibition shows not only photography, but also other old and new media, television, internet, video, design, games, magazines, with an excursus on fashion and design. The exhibition reveals that, in Brazil, visual culture is a dynamic mix of high and low, elitist and populist, artistic and applied arts. Brazilian society proves a fertile source of material for much of the media and for many artists. A recurrent theme in the media and in the work of artists and photographers is the gulf between rich and poor. A number of works in the exhibition examine life in the favelas of São Paolo and Rio de Janeiro.  

In São Paolo many young photographers have united to work in collectives. When out photographing on the city streets, it is safer to work in groups rather than alone, and working as a collective makes larger projects easier to realise. These collectives commonly reject the clichéd images that proliferate in the mainstream media and challenge the codes of traditional photo-journalism. One of the collectives is Cia de Foto, whose work includes the series Paulistas. Photographed on the Avenida Paulista, Paulistas is a sequence of street shots in which the photographers utilised the effect of sunlight glancing off the skyscrapers.

The media habitually portrays inhabitants of the favelas as violent and criminal. In reality, not all residents fit the drug-trafficking, crime-seeking stereotype. Many are members of organisations and collectives that set up and run education projects for residents and their — often disadvantaged — children. Viva Favela, a photo project by five photographers, has been selected for Brazil Contemporary. Taken by photographers who themselves come from low-income communities, the images present an uplifting portrait of life in the favela.

Baile Funk is an edgy, up-tempo beat with an eclectic musical pedigree. And is currently the coolest sound in the favelas. Played at parties, Baile Funk is noisy, with aggressive language and sexually provocative dance moves. Photographer Daniela Dacorso managed to sneak her camera into Baile Funk parties, and captured the vibe of the crowd in her photo series ‘Totoma'. The series is presented to the sounds of Baile Funk.

Zupi, a design magazine focusing on artistic and experimental artwork, quadrupled its circulation from 3,000 to 15,000 in just a few years. Conceived by young designer Allan Szacher, this runaway success is typical of Brazil's creative industries. Published quarterly, the magazine promotes talented artists from all over the world: a quirky cocktail of art, photography, graphic design and cartoons. The Zupi editorial team is designing a spatial presentation in the spirit of the magazine especially for the Nederland Fotomuseum. Besides Zupi the exhibition has other examples of graphic design, innovative projects testifying to Brazil's long tradition of high calibre graphic work.

Within a short space of time, artist and photographer Gabriela de Gusmão Pereirra gathered together an unusual visual archive under the title Rua dos Inventos ("street of inventions"). In the streets of Rio de Janeiro she photographed the inventive structures fabricated out of "useless" materials by street vendors, beggars and the homeless to make their everyday life a little more comfortable or to display the small items they have to sell. The ingenuity and creativity they put into these constructions has become a vital aspect of their street survival skills.

FILE, the Brazilian festival for the electronic arts, has joined forces with the Nederlands Fotomuseum to present a selection of recently developed computer games and interactive installations. Visitors are of course invited to have a go and try the games for themselves.

Rio de Janeiro and São Paolo are vast urban areas with diverse, breathtaking skylines. Photographer Helmut Batista specialises in making both 180 and 360 degree panorama photographs. Visitors can become immersed in some of his large format city vistas. 

Video art is thriving in Brazil and, each edition, the latest offerings are presented during the festival Videobrasil in São Paolo. The exhibition includes videos by Kiko Goifman, Marco del Fiol, EstúdioBijari & Ricardo Lazzetta.

NAI Publishers will release a richly illustrated full-colour publication in Dutch/English. The volume presents a picture of the diversity of Brazilian culture and contains contributions by Paul Meurs, Jaap Guldemond, Frits Gierstberg and others.

Sao Paulo, SESC Pompeia, architect Lina Bo Bardi – Netherlands Architecture Institute, Photo: Nelson Kon.

Daniela Dacorso, Tiger.

Por Este Amor.