Every art biennial worth its lighter aspires to be a comment on the state of the world. The one of São Paulo, second in antiquity after that of Venice and the most prestigious of the southern hemisphere, known for its political positioning since its foundation in 1951, was not going to be an exception. The person responsible for its new edition, the Cameroonian Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, who runs the House of Cultures of the World of Berlin, expressed it without surrounding this Thursday during the presentation of the great appointment with art, which will open its doors to the public on Saturday. “I don’t have a thesis to formulate, but a concern for the direction of the world. How to save humanity from this violent and toxic path?” Ndikung wondered, who has piloted the appointment with a team of five other international commissioners. “Perhaps there are other ways and I suspect that artists can help us find them. My obsession, inside and outside this biennial, is the same: how can we live better together?”
The central issue of this biennial is “humanity”, banal concept but rarely addressed as a theme of a great art exhibition. Ndikung distances himself from enlightened humanism, focused on white and exclusive men with women, slaves or indigenous peoples, to propose a more open and respectful notion with the other species. The exhibition claims the knowledge of cultures such as Yoruba, Nguemba, Amazight, Urdu, Mori, Candomblé or Sufí, and is also enriched, as usual in this type of appointment, of the feminist, black and black tradition queer.
At the historic headquarters of the Ciccillo Matarazzo pavilion, one of Oscar Niemeyer’s masterpieces, an edition conceived as an “listening and meeting” exercise is displayed. This great white prism, with its free floor, helical ramps and three diaphanous floors, is once again an ideal scenario for a large format, open and free appointment for all. The metaphor that inspires this edition is that of the estuary, a place where traditions, disciplines and ideas from different shores converge and transform into a new common entity. In total, 125 works by artists and groups are exhibited, articulated in six cores that address central issues of our present.
On the ground floor, surrounded by the nature of the Ibirapuera Park, several works revolve around the Earth as a new gold on this planet in crisis. Priceus Okoyomon recreates artificial land inside the building, while the Sertão Negro collective, linked to Quilombismo, lifts a clay wall that houses an informal museum of indigenous knowledge, along with other variants of the old curiosities cabinet. The idea of community crosses Frank Bowling’s canvases, in a dialogue between traditions that oscillates between the stimulating and the predictable, because it has already been seen in other similar appointments.
This edition prolongs the course opened by Manuel Borja-Villel, a member of the Commissioner team of the previous edition, which placed the decolonization and historical controversies in the center with 80% of non-white artists, and anticipated the 2024 Venice Biennial of 2024, of the Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa, with his historic deployment of indigenous artists. Some artists and proposals are repeated here.
Several works raise forms of resistance to dehumanization, the plundering of the earth and the new authoritarian drift. They evoke memories of slavery or territorial appropriation, while defending alternative models to the monoculture of the plantation. Another section addresses forced migrations, urban transformations and new encounters between humans, animals, machines, viruses and bacteria. The works portray the distracted beauty of a world in ruins, populated by CIBORGS and other hybrid creatures. French artist Laure Prouvost presents an impossible flower, made of glass, cloth and cement, with breasts in the form of breasts that drop their seeds on the visitor.
Explanatory texts are discreet and posters are almost hidden to favor direct contact with works, free of prejudices. “There are too many words in the art world,” Ndikung smiles. Consecrated names such as Isa Genzken, Kader Attia, Óscar Murillo or Wolfgang Tillmans coexist in equality with unknown artists for the western public, mostly belonging to native cultures.
Cross in a discreet corner, Tillmans presents a photographic series of Ríos, from Nile to Congo, which has portrayed for 25 years and now brings together for the first time. “Seeing them together, I seemed to hear them talk to each other, as if they established a silent dialogue that until then had not imagined,” he explained. For him, the word humanityweighed by its association with that enlightened and exclusive model, it has recovered a different meaning. “It is more open, humble and linked to the practice of coexistence. The essential thing is to listen, see and recognize ourselves. That is what I find so moving in this biennial,” he said.
In São Paulo, beauty is vindicated as an act of resistance to the Feistic austerity that dominates much of contemporary art. The Biennial is committed to color, for a sensual staging and a poetic language that, according to those responsible, is able to go further than openly political discourse, because it condenses meanings, opens possibilities and imagines new worlds.
“It may sound naive, but I have no choice but to trust the power of art to transform,” says Ndikung. “The artists do not always stop wars, but they can educate, reveal and anticipate the events. In the thirties, many sensed fascism before I broke out. I learned more about the history of Spain through the paintings of Goya than with any manual.” That is, he insists, the power of art. “And, in times like these, it would be foolish to ignore it.”