May 19 to July 17, 2022
The Current Art Program, an initiative of the Tomie Ohtake Institute, aims to promote ambitious experimental projects and new debates on contemporary art, with emerging artists as its main contributors, with increasing participation in Brazil and abroad. Each year, Arte Atual, with the support of the galleries, invites a series of artists based on a theme, fact or selection chosen by the curatorial team.
The Program has also directed efforts to research and monitor the production of female artists, still considerably less in numbers in exhibitions across the country. In this sense, the tenth commemorative edition of Arte Atual, For a long time I believed I dreamed I was free, is dedicated to 24 emerging and established Brazilian contemporary artists. Curated by Priscyla Gomes, the exhibition brings together different generations that present landscapes, portraits, performances and photographs that reflect on the female body as a territory. “Artists from various backgrounds and generations make visible multiple explorations of the understanding of the female body as the core of desires, wisdom and ancestry; as a metaphor for territory and a landscape constructed many times by fiction; as the core of political questioning and the target of constant censorship; and, mainly, as a way of envisioning different epistemologies”.
According to the curator, the title refers to a work carried out by the Minas Gerais sculptor Maria Martins, who marked the international scene in the 1940s and 1950s and only gained late recognition from critics of Brazilian art. “The work in question, a bronze sculpture produced in 1947, was installed in a lake and destroyed by the weather and neglect. The bronze condensed one of the artist's main investigations into the relationships between femininity, sexuality and the specificities of living in the tropics”. Gomes also points out that this story surrounding Martins' sculpture serves as a motto for the exploration of countless representations and questions from Brazilian women artists who, each in their own way, reflect on the female condition.
