A groundbreaking exhibition at GES-2 House of Culture uniting Videobrasil’s archive with Russian video art, exploring the evolution of identity, culture, and performance across continents.
Bakary Diallo, Volume (still), 2012. Videobrasil Collection. Courtesy of Videobrasil.
The upcoming exhibition ‘Videobrasil. Needs No Translation: Four Decades of Video and Performance’ will debut at the GES-2 House of Culture in Moscow on the 12 of December, 2024. A collaboration between Associação Cultural Videobrasil and GES-2, this ambitious project highlights over 40 years of groundbreaking video and performance art from the Global South, blending them with Russian video works to foster intercultural dialogue.
Solange Farkas, founder of Associação Cultural Videobrasil, and Alessandra Bergamaschi organised the exhibition into chronological sections from 1980 to the present. It features artists from across Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Ethiopia, Mali, Indonesia, and more, alongside Russian works curated by Andrei Vasilenko and Dmitry Belkin. The Russian contributions reflect the socio-political complexities of the region’s transitional periods and explore themes of evolving identity.
Farkas describes the exhibition as “a celebration of boundary-pushing art, from experimental videos of the 1980s to contemporary works amplifying voices from the Geopolitical South.” Bergamaschi emphasises the interplay between performance and video, noting, “The performative reveals more than what is captured in the verbal register, bridging cultural divides through the eloquence of bodies.”
Key highlights include Screen², a site-specific installation by Brazilian artist Eder Santos. Commissioned for this exhibition, it draws from the Videobrasil Archive and incorporates iconic works by artists such as Ana Pi, Ayrson Heráclito, Melati Suryodarmo, Rosana Paulino, and more. The installation creates an immersive environment where gestures, figures, and landscapes transform into “moving memories of a living archive,” set against a soundtrack by Paulo Santos.
Other featured artists include Vitória Cribb, Luiz Roque, Ezra Wube, Sandra Kogut, Bakary Diallo, and Natalia Skobeeva, whose works collectively underscore video and performance art’s diversity and innovative spirit.
This partnership between Videobrasil and GES-2 House of Culture offers visitors a unique exploration of the global and local, video and performance, memory and identity through the lens of four decades of artmaking.
The exhibition will be on view from the 12th of December, 2024, until the 9th of February, 2025. For more information, please visit Videobrasil.
