Uncategorized | Despina

Paul Setúbal

27.05.2019 - 30.06.2019

Born in Aparecida de Goiânia (GO), lives and works between Goiânia, Brasília and São Paulo. He holds a Phd and a Master’s Degree in Art and Visual Culture from the Federal University of Goiás (UFG). His works are part of public collections such as the Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR), Museu de Arte de Brasília, Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Goiás (MAC – GO) and Casa do Olhar Luiz Sacilotto. He is a member of the EmpreZa Performance Group.

The body is a dimension constantly explored in his production, an important material, social and geographical support of discussions that permeate situations of conflict, either as a way of experiencing and testing its physical limits, or as a way of translating relations of power. His research develops in various media such as sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, video, photography and performance, addressing the problems and symbologies of the body in contemporary society, its use, control, violence, resistance, abuse and power relationships.

During his residence at Despina, the artist will develop works that deal with the political and social situation of the country, always attentive to the daily events that surround the city of Rio de Janeiro and the surroundings of the studio space.

Solo exhibitions
“Closed Body”, at C Galeria, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil [2018]; “Damage and Excess”, Galeria Andrea Rehder, São Paulo, Brazil [2016]; “Fire Warning”, Elefante Centro Cultural, Brasília, Brazil [2015].

Group exhibitions
29th Edition of the Program of Exhibitions of Centro Cultural São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; 36th Panorama of Brazilian Art, Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo, Brasil [2019]; “Art Democracy Utopy: Who does not fight is dead!”, Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; “Demonstration by Absurd”, Instituto Tomie Othake, São Paulo, Brazil [2018]; “The Flags of Revolution”, Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, Recife, Brazil; 13th Verbo, Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo, Brazil; “Bone”, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Brazil [2017]; Dark Mofo, Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania, Australia; Behind the Sun, HOME, London (UK); “The Color of Brazil”, Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil [2016]; “Communal Land: Marina Abramovic + MAI”, Sesc Pompéia, São Paulo, Brazil [2015].

Awards/Residencies
7th SP-Arte Residency Award, Delfina Foundation, London – UK [2019]; Foco Bradesco ArtRio Award, Despina Residency Programme, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil [2019]; Pivô Arte Pesquisa [2018]; 45th Luiz Sacilotto Contemporary Art Salon, Prêmio Aquisição [2017].

More information
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/paul.setubal
Website: https://www.paulsetubal.com
Instagram: @paulsetubal

Pictures Gallery
soon

This residence happens as a result of the award received by the artist at the 6th FOCO Bradesco ArtRio Award in 2018.

Brooks Dierdorff

01.05.2019 - 31.05.2019

Lives and works in Orlando, Florida (USA). He is an assistant professor of photography at the University of Central Florida. His research explores photography’s crucial role in mediating our current relationship to nature in the age of the Anthropocene. Often taking final form as installation, Brooks uses the tension between photography and other mediums to deconstruct imagery and material culture associated with the outdoors.

While in residence at Despina, Dierdorff will be researching and making work about the Tijuca National Park, an area once decimated by agriculture that was eventually completely replanted in order to preserve Rio de Janerio’s water source. The artist sees the Tijuca National Park as an ideal symbol for the complex relationships between humans and the environment that continues to be played out all over the world.

More information
Web site: www.brooksdierdorff.com

Pictures Gallery
to be posted soon

Strange Bodies Residency – Deadline 15.05

“Strange bodies: Rio de Janeiro remains beautiful and oppressive” is a project in the field of arts and aesthetic-political activism designed to promote visibility, empowerment and self-representation of young artists in conditions of vulnerability, such as trans, non-binary, indigenous and black people.

This project was conceived as a reaction to the murder of artist Matheusa Passareli and from our permanent indignation at the rise of violence against bodies historically subjected to violations of rights and precarious conditions.

During the month of August 2019, our space will function as a hub for coexistence and collective activation, with a residency programme and a public agenda, which includes film-screenings, talks and workshops.

OPEN CALL FOR THE RESIDENCY PROGRAMME

We look for artists with a diversity of bodies, subjectivities and practices that intend to mediate meanings and interlocutions with the public. We intend to build lifting devices for the creation of new worlds and self-affirmation of the dissonant powers. Four (4) artists who live in Rio de Janeiro will be selected. The Selection Committee will analyze the affinity of the proposals with the concept of the project.

THE RESIDENCY PROGRAMME OFFERS

Collective art studio
Curatorial support (one on one and group meetings)
Follow-up weekly meetings
Admin and logistics support
Living expenses – R$1.500 (one thousand five hundred Reais) per artist
Production grant – R$ 500 (five hundred Reais) per artist
Final show to present the works developed during the residency

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION AND TO SEE HOW TO APPLY (IN PORTUGUESE ONLY)

This project was conceived by Despina in collaboration with Gabe Passareli. It is funded through a donation organized by Alexander and Chantal Maljers-van Erven Dorens in honor of Matheusa Passareli, who participated in the 2017 Bison Caravan-Brazil project, coordinated by Chantal.

Daniel Santiso and Max Willa Morais

Daniel Santiso and Max Willa

11.02.2019 - 31.03.2019

This residence works as an experiment for a future fully funded programme, which aims to support the development of the practice and research of local artists. A big thanks to curators Bernardo Jose De Souza, Guilherme Altmayer, Leno Veras and Victor Gorgulho, who support and participate in this first experience.

Santiso and Willa Morais live and work in Rio de Janeiro. Their research starts from invisible narratives to affirm collective memories through photographs, texts and actions, dealing with representations in the social and aesthetic field. Throughout this residence at Despina, the duo will gather some material of their previous urban interventions, in order to bring to another scale the geographical, poetic and political situations that, in their processes, project better living and work conditions within the Brazilian colonial-structured society. Through the combination of past and future and starting from the relationship with people, territories and knowledge, the artists seek visual processes as tools to create shared practices.

Daniel Santiso (1993) is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Graduated in media studies from UFRJ – School of Communication (within an international agreement with the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle UFR Arts et Médias. His current works include a collaboration with the Anarca Films Residence (2018), at Espaço Saracvra; the production of the photo book “Livro-Poeira” (“Dust-Book”) (2018), as a result of the experimental documentary “A poeira não quer sair do esqueleto” (2018), directed by Max Willa Morais and funded by the Department of Culture of Rio de Janeiro and Fundação Cesgranrio; and also the action “13 + 17” (2018), which took place at Galpão Bela Maré in partnership with Felipe Ferreira, Guilherme Altmayer, Maíra Barillo, Pâmella Liz and Rodrigo D’Alcântara. Currently, Santiso is researching elements of visual communication – in relation to the Brazilian black diaspora -, in public and private collections, and also developing actions around collective memories.

More information
http://cargocollective.com/danielsantiso
silvasantisodaniel@gmail.com

Max Willa Morais (1993) is an artist specialized in Visual Arts Languages and Education. He participates in the Projeto Experiências Indiciais (“Index Experiments Project”) at the State University of Rio de Janeiro – UERJ, for which he has worked as an executive producer for the seminar/show “Between nature and the artifice” (2017-2018). He has also worked as a researcher of education and cultures of the peripheries at the Maria and João Aleixo Institute (2018). Willa organized with Daniel Santiso and Lorran Dias the “Cinerama Week”, an independent film and video art show with collaborations from UFRJ, UERJ, Université Toulouse 2 and several cultural centers in Rio de Janeiro (2016 – 2017). His work investigates stories in archives, geographical situations and material / immaterial relations with people and objects, especially the ones referring to diasporic and familiar memories.

More information
https://maxwillamorais.wixsite.com/portfolio
maxwillamorais@gmail.com

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Pictures Gallery
by Frederico Pellachin

Manuel La Rosa

01.02.2019 - 31.03.2019

Born in Lima, Peru. Lives and works in Santiago, Chile (since 2000). A visual artist and a photographer graduated from the University of Chile, La Rosa has participated in several collective and individual exhibitions in institutions such as the Museu de Arte Contemporanea and Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, both in Chile. He is an assistant professor of the photographic department at Faculty of Arts of the University of Chile.

His work seeks to understand human processes and behaviors evoked through organic and inorganic elements, as well as philosophical conceptions of experimental or scientific work who are present in artistic practices in general. Recently, his interests are focused on his migration experience in Chile and its connection with his country of origin.

As an artist in residence at Depina, La Rosa intends to connect the different imaginaries that surround his current artistic research, either through the incidence of racial and socio-cultural miscegenation in Brazil, or by the allusion to his Peruvian origin and to his migratory and identity experience in Chile. Furthermore, he wants to approach the social reconfiguration that is currently taking place in Chile, based on what Brazil has lived in colonial times, linking a tripartite and timeless vision on the distinctions of what we conceive as “Latin American societies”, which are related through the same historical fate.

The idea is to transfer these problematizations to experimental processes, in which the artist intends to use vernacular elements (organic and inorganic) and to somehow poeticize conceptions of origin, reformulation and constant transformation.

More information
Web site: manuel-larosa.com
Instagram: @mnuelarosa

Pictures Gallery (horizontal scrolling)
by Frederico Pellachin

Adriana Nascimento

02.01.2019 - 31.01.2019

Lives and works in São João Del-Rei, Minas Gerais, where she is a professor at UFSJ (Federal University of São João Del-Rei). Her research investigates urban processes and it deals with topics such as drift, appropriation and an experience with a writing / narrative that requires to be authorial and therefore, partial. Simultaneously with her research, Nascimento also works as a tutor for the interdisciplinary Master’s Program at UFSJ, which is articulated to the project Ephemeral Interventions in Urban Contexts: cultural and artistic action in the transformation of the city’s image.

Her curatorial project for the residence at Despina will take a look on the urban. It will question the place of the urban in the contemporaneity and what is the urban, which is not necessarily the city. In addition to a curatorial practice, the proposal here is to create, with collaborative participation, a sort of inventory of urban readings in an inter- and transdisciplinary process of exhibition-archive-interviews on the theme: Latin American Urbanities . It proposes to list some possible ways on how Latin American urbanities are being expressed in different fields of knowledge, including the artistic and urban. Among the questions raised, the following stand out: Which languages cover such complexities? What do they say about urbanity? What urban elements dignify the city? The presence of nature offers urbanity? And its absence? How are they represented, incorporated or even rejected in different disciplinary fields? Abstract, real, imaginary? What repertoires and references?

This residency is one of the moments (space-time) of this process of creation, of assembly-collage of excerpts raised, like notes in sheet music for a concert, still to be executed. The exposure-file-interviews that result from it is a later process: document, memory and record.

In addition to our website, you can check the process of the residency on the following links below:
Urbanidades Latinoamericanas (Facebook Page)
Instagram: @ adriana.nascimento.arq

This residence has the support of UFSJ / PROEX and the following students: Pedro Azalim, Nalu Carvalho, Alice Saute Leitão and Luciana Canavez.

Pictures Gallery
to be posted soon

Apoio

Lara Lima

Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Graduated in Textile from the School of Fine Arts – UFRJ and postgraduated in Methodology of Arts Teaching from UNICESUMAR, her background also includes courses in photomontage, photo-journalism, engraving and other media at Ateliê da Imagem and at EAV – Parque Lage. She works as an artist and activist in the city where she lives.

Through photography, video and other media, Lima carries out copyright work and records the process of ongoing struggles in the city, conflicts that appear reflected directly in her work. The use of art as a pedagogical and therapeutic tool is also her object of study. She also leads workshops on video-art and animation for young people and children who live in the Baixada Fluminense area. Currently, she is researching about the place of women in the arts world.

More information
https://www.flickr.com/photos/lara-lima/
https://www.instagram.com/laralimaf/
https://vimeo.com/laralima

Selection of Works (horizontal scrolling)

Daniel Frickmann

Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil. Graduated in Visual Communication Design from PUC-Rio (2016). During his degree (in 2015), he was granted to do an exchange course at Central Saint Martins – University of the Arts London (UK).

His work consists of an observational drawing practice, used both for the creation of works in painting and in illustrations for pieces of design and publishing art.

In his most recent researches, he created a series of paintings based on photographs of car accidents, reported in Brazilian newspapers. These works are all done using acrylic paint and function as an exercise of observation of photographs and daily images.

Besides his more authorial production, the artist also works with stamp design for national brands.

More information
Website: www.danielfrickmann.com
Instagram: @danielfrickmann

Selection of works (horizontal scrolling)

Amina McConvell

01.11.2018 - 30.11.2018

Lives and works in Darwin, in the Northern Territory of Australia. She is a visual artist, creative producer and a community arts worker.

In her practice, Amina works predominantly within a geometric conceptual framework through the mediums of mural painting, wall drawing and installation. She makes large-scale works, often using these mediums in combination to create site-specific works, either directly onto the walls or by installing pieces developed for the specifics of a gallery or alternative spaces.

Amina has exhibited extensively across Australia and in Southeast Asia, including at Watch This Space (Alice Springs, 2010), Jogja Gallery (Yogyakarta, Indonesia 2012), Sangkring Project Space (Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 2013), KRACK! STUDIO (Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 2014), Griffith University Art Gallery (Brisbane, 2015), Verge Gallery, University of Sydney (2015), Firstdraft (Sydney, 2015) Sydney Non Objective (2016), J-Studio (Manila, Philippines, 2016) and 98B COLLABoratory (Manila, Philippines, 2018). Amina has been included in the Gertrude Contemporary Studio 18 Residency Program and has received numerous prestigious grants and awards for her work as a visual artist, including through the Australia Council for The Arts, The National Association of the Visual Arts (NAVA) and the Ian Potter Foundation and the Northern Territory Government.

A Combinatorial Explosion (work in progress)

Amina is currently developing a new body of work under the auspices of the Australia Council for the Arts. Her residency at Despina was dedicated to the research and development phase of her ongoing project titled “A Combinatorial Explosion”, in which she looks at the exponential cascading chain reactions that occur in nuclear explosions. At the moment, she is exploring a visual mash-up of diagrammatic representations of nuclear reactions and imagery from the history of nuclear technology, which is referenced as source material, informing the form and composition of the mural.

Amina is currently working with geometric conceptualism to create a progressive composition whereby one abstract form triggers another, and another and another, etc. The progression of forms makes its way around the gallery walls and other atypical aspects of the space(s), so that the space becomes enveloped by the composition. The artist composes her works from abstract forms which are stylised, cartoon-graphic – and are situated in a shifting spatial landscape. The composition is dense in form, colour and pattern and the aesthetic sense references to the Neo-Geo Conceptual Movement, Atomic Age Design and Neo-Concrete Abstraction.

More information
https://aminamcconvell.blogspot.com/

With the support from

Pictures Gallery (horizontal scrolling)
by Frederico Pellachin

Vinícius Pinto Rosa

01.09.2018 - 30.09.2018

Lives and works in Niterói (RJ). He currently holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Arts from Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) and works as an assistant to Rio-based artist Laura Lima. His practice incorporates issues that cross identities and subjectivities in the production of objects and installations, with the body itself as a power of image and action, which, in turn, establishes new forms of relations, access and images of the world and of the other. His practice is very influenced by the universe of a carpentry (where his father works and where much of his experience within the studio space takes place).

His works reach both performance and design fields and question constructions, polarizations and binary lines already established. They also reveal a hybridism and a multiplicity of activations and accesses that the body can create from a direct relation with the object. Vinicius has been developing the projects “Devices” and “Baseline” since 2014 and they have already been presented in several Brazilian galleries and art spaces.

Vinicius Pinto Rosa’s residence was commissioned by the British Council and Creative Scotland under the Open Bodies Residency programme, designed jointly by Despina and The Fruitmarket Gallery. More information here.

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Curatorial statement by Raphael Fonseca

In Vinícius Pinto Rosa’s recent work, sculptural practice that connects to the human body is of central interest. Drawing from their family’s expertise in crafting jewellery and fashion accessories, Pinto Rosa constructs adornments that both decorate the body and disrupt the normative dressing of it. For Open Bodies, Pinto Rosa created an ensemble of wearable works made from paper. They initially were fitted to the artists’ body to be photographed, then suspended from the ceiling at heights that related which parts of the body’s anatomy had held them. The effect is to summon a presence fluctuating between human and post-human, born in the experimental conflux of materials and the material of life itself.

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Pictures Gallery (horizontal scrolling)
by Frederico Pellachin