HIAP Helsinki International Artist Programme in collaboration with SINNE and Frame Visual Art Finland organise a screening and talk with Brazilian curator Marcio Harum on Friday, 18 December, 5–7 pm at SINNE.

The screening includes films and videos by Jonathas de Andrade, Virginia de Medeiros, Yuri Firmeza, Danielle Fonseca, Barbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, Leticia Ramos, Distruktur, Martín Aramburú, Luiz Roque and Cristiano Lenhardt.

SET TO GO

The film and video programme SET TO GO is a compilation of up-and-coming works by Brazilian artists, some of whom have made a name for themselves internationally, with others about to follow their footsteps. Almost all were born in the 1970s and 1980s and live across in the country, growing up as part of a society that gradually recovered from effects of the civilian and military dictatorship (1964 – 1985). They spent their formative years watched by the hegemonic powers of what was considered then the ‘underdeveloped or developing third world.” This context was strongly marked by unstable government policies – a process that spawned a complex economic transition, which saw the format of peripheral capitalism converted into the acclaimed global model of our time.

SET TO GO is divided into two parts. The first, Northern Star, puts together thoughts, manifestations and actions whose artistic aspects are confronted by the conservative wave that has swept the world lately. The videos presented deal with the moral hangover that’s taking hold of us all, portraying conflicts of cultural interest such as questions of heritage preservation, traditional identity, memory, and the comprehension of the body as territory versus the rise of commercial speculation, the violence of boundless gentrification and the emergence of an increasing unethical state hostility towards collective live. From all sides, the space finds itself in ruin, the ruin of losses of citizen rights.

Southern Light, the second part of SET TO GO, features films and videos that point to a new geography of future possibilities. The selected artworks are based on the presence of imagination as the main artistic substrate of their time. They utopically present different natures of image manipulation. At times these are critically examining the alienation of aesthetical subcultures, or postulate new dimensions of sensitivity that correspond to ideas and experimental working modes. The screening of this selection of works assumes an uncommon reality that runs in a sense coherent in parallel to a critical distance kept from the widespread formulas of the ‘art for export’ paradigm.

SET TO GO was commissioned by the Contemporary Arte Centre (CAC), Vilnius and premiered at the CAC Cinema in December 2015. This programme was supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture. 

Marcio Harum is a visual arts curator at Centro Cultural São Paulo (CCSP).