10th Mercosul Biennial- Messages from a New America

23.10/2015 – 06.12/2015
Porto Alegre, Brazil

Fundada en 1997 en Porto Alegre, Brazil
Director: Luiz Carlos Mandelli
10th Biennial curator: Gaudêncio Fidelis
The 10th Mercosul Biennial has opened to the public in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and runs from October 23 to December 6. This edition of the biennial is dedicated exclusively to art from Latin America, searching for its roots and presenting a new curatorial model that goes against the grain by including works from the early 18th century to the present. Titled Messages from a New America, this large-scale exhibition seeks to break new ground on shifting the attention to innovative curatorial platforms for the art of Latin America. The 10th Mercosul Biennial is curated by art historian and curator Dr. Gaudêncio Fidelis (Brazil), Chief Curator Márcio Tavares (Brazil), Adjunct Curator, Assistant Curator Ana Zavadil (Brazil), and Educational Curator Cristián G. Gallegos (Chile).
The Biennial consists of seven major exhibitions, interconnected and built to encompass a number of issues concerning the art of the region, some of which are dealt with for the first time anywhere, such as smell and dust as material reality of the art objects. The exhibitions are: The Biography of Urban Life; Modernism in Parallax; Neobaroque Anthropophagy; Olfactory: Smell in Art; Body Apparatuses; Dust and the World of Objects; and Marginália of Form. The Biennial occupies several venues throughout the city of Porto Alegre, including the Rio Grande do Sul Museum of Art, Santander Cultural, Mercosul Museum of Human Rights, Usina do Gasômetro, CEEE Cultural Center, Acervo Independente, and InstitutoLing.

This edition will seek to give greater visibility, legibility, and reception to the art of the region through a large-scale exhibition built around its most significant productions, incorporating a significant number of “blind spots” unrecognized by critics and historians. Thus, contributions unjustly overlooked by critics and observers will be featured. The encompassing conceptual fields of the 10th edition of the biennial will be: The Journey of Adversities; The Insurgency of the Senses; The Deletion of the Tropics; The Journey Continues. Each will comprise one or more exhibitions, along with a program of activities for professional development in the curatorial field and a connected Educational Program.
The 10th Biennial will take into account the historical substratum of art, emphasizing the dimension of excellence and artistic and cultural meaning of contemporary productions. Thus, a wide selection of canonical and non-canonical works will be on exhibit, which will offer a comprehensive historical framework reaching into the present.

The curatorial platform of the 10th Biennial includes canonical and non-canonical works, as well as works considered by the curators as “blind spots” due to a conspicuous absence from criticism, art history narratives and curatorial endeavors which have failed to take such works into account.

With 646 works by more than 200 lenders, the exhibition also includes an Experimental School of Curating, which will run for one month, with lectures and workshops by specialists from various fields of exhibition making from diverse countries from Latin America. The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive publication program, including the catalogs of the exhibition, a publication about the educational program, and another one on issues of contemporary curating.

The Biennial is organized by Fundação Bienal do Mercosul, a private non-profit organization from Brazil. Its mission is to develop artistic and educational projects in the field of visual arts, encouraging dialogues between contemporary artists and communities.