22/03— 10/06/24
Gallery 5. Level 2
Malba opens its 2024 exhibition calendar with Rosana Paulino. Amefricana, the most comprehensive exhibition outside Brazil by this artist born in São Paulo in 1967. The exhibition brings together a collection of works created over 30 years, between 1994 and 2024, from the perspective that the Atlantic inscribes on Afro-descendant America.
In her installations, drawings, engravings, embroideries, and sculptures, Paulino addresses slavery and violence in the African diaspora in Brazil as the central theme of her practice, which is not only artistic but also educational and militant. A versatile creator, she explores various techniques, with a special fondness for graphic art and drawing. Through specific operations (such as stitching, sewing, and the use of archives, among others), she critically traverses Brazilian history, problematizing the ethnic construction of the nation.
Paulino's poetic interventions reinscribe the archives of the African diaspora in South America. This is done through constant dialogue between personal archives, historical archives, reconceptualizations of Brazilian art, interrogations of the matrices of Western science (its classification systems, its hypotheses, its ways of ordering the world), and also through an approach to the affections and circumstances of black women in Brazilian and Latin American society.
The exhibition proposes a journey that allows to approach concepts from a complex and deeply affective poetic. It includes five large installations, displayed together with drawings, engravings and a video. It is organized into four conceptual hubs ("Atlantic Memories," "The Colonial Structures of Science," "The Narratives of Brazilian Art," and "Weavings of Subjectivity") that are not separate zones, but rather axes of meaning that run through almost all of Paulino's works.
The title Amefricana derives from the concept of “amefricanidad” (Amefricanity), coined by Brazilian philosopher, black activist, feminist, and sociologist Lélia Gonzalez (1935–1994). “Amefricanas” are the individual identities, structured in collective experience, of those who share cultural ties contrary to colonial domination. The term captures the particularities of black women and highlights their active participation in history, unlike other racist and sexist narratives that diminish or suppress their importance.
Curators: Andrea Giunta e Igor Simões.
Dossier
See dossier of the exhibition (Issuu) →
Download dossier of the exhibition (PDF) →
Guided Tours
Wednesdays and Saturdays, 5 p.m.
Included with museum admission ticket.
Catalogue
To accompany the exhibition, Malba is presenting a catalog with reproductions of the works on display, plus a collection of texts that contribute to and expand the reception of the artist's work. The book includes illustrated essays by each of the curators and a conversation between them and Paulino, as well as a specially commissioned piece by Kanitra Fletcher, curator of African-American and Afrodiasporic art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The volume is completed with the republication of a text by the late Lélia Gonzalez, and a glossary compiled by curator Weslei Chagas, who specializes in Black art.
Rosana Paulino
São Paulo, Brazil, 1967
She holds a PhD in Visual Arts from the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo - Eca/USP, she is a specialist in Printmaking from the London Print Studio in England and has a degree in Printmaking from the Eca/USP. She was a scholarship holder of the Ford Foundation from 2006 to 2008 and Capes from 2008 to 2011. In 2014, she was awarded a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Italy, and in 2017 she won the Bravo and ABCA (Brazilian Association of Art Critics) awards in the Contemporary Art category. Her work has been exhibited at important museums such as the MAM - Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo; UNM - University of New Mexico Art Museum, New Mexico, United States, and Museu Afro-Brasil - São Paulo, as well as at the 59th Venice Art Biennale. Her solo exhibitions include The Time of Things, Mendes Wood DM, Brussels (2022); The Sewing of Memory, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2018); Atlântico Vermelho, at Padrão dos Descobrimentos, Lisbon (2017), and Black Women at Espace Culturel Fort Griffon, Besançon, France (2014).
