Booth B12
Anna Bella Geiger (Rio de Janeiro, 1933) is one of the most valued Brazilian artists on the international scene, considered one of the pioneers in using non - conventional means to experience other ways of posing and questioning what happened in Brazil. A time anxious for freedoms in which the practice of art was understood as a space of questioning and inquiry, in which a new sensibility emerged and which represented a rupture with respect to the traditional languages: transvers ality of disciplines, integration in t he creative process of mechanisms relating to philosophy, sociology, psychoanalysis, politics, technology, popular culture, science, architecture, music or language. The 1970s are a stage of deep debate on the relation ship between Brazilian (peripheral) culture and European and North American (centralized) cultures. With her hybrid maps, visionaries and critics, full of an anticolonialist clamor, Anna Bella endorses the well - known Uruguayan maxim Torres García, who, pro posing a map of Latin America upside down, proclaimed that the South is the North , and vice versa. All his work reflects the idea of decolonization.
Although her beginnings in the 50s were abstract, in her first stays in New York, she was stimulated by the questions posed by conceptual art, coming into contact with personalities su ch as Vito Acconci and Joseph Beuys. It is in the 70s when the cartographic principle is found as a privileged instrument of a critical vision of the situation not only political but also of questioning the art system. Formula of this stage: "Place of acti on - below the Equator, Tropic, here, there is no room for the power of international art, here the theories were not made, the readings were not established, the history was not built. The margin, the peripheral ex - colony, because here it tells us that th e international is not universal, and here art is made".
Her production in these years is marked by a highly experimental nature and develops the two major themes that are repeated in some proposals that use the series as a representation formula: maps an d the review of cultural stereotypes, where another Brazil teaches us: that of minorities, that of postcolonialism, that of women, that of forgotten territories and clandestine cultural discourses. The artist reveals the contradictions of the representatio nal system of culture and mistrusts the pedagogical mission of the image of the Brazilian native who, during the dictatorship, is empowered with the idea of Latinity .
Anna Bella questions the given maps, rewrites them showing the process, the stages, the cartography, documents, alters them and makes them visible through resources, procedures and languages that allow them to turn the hegemonic narrative into a spatial concept and revise the concept politician of said space. The map is the representation o f a territory as much mental as political, economic, social and sentimental that, in its reverse, also implies "to understand how the West was born and how the modern world order was founded", since the colonial wound indicates the absences with which has been told the story. By organizing her poetry in thematic series she mobilizes a conception of art close to an archetypal vision: differential repetition assumes the role of establishing a dialogue between present and past, and allows defining the identity that recognizes its own historicity by placing it at the center of the process creator change and permanence. The artist, then, assumes a critical position in relation to the original ideology of the avant - garde, which does not mean that for her, the exer cise of art is not a constant challenge, an experimental attitude, thanks to which the technique becomes a practice of risk and not remain as a mere possibility given in advance.
The Geiger maps have an iconic character that is tense to create a true "top ography of art" (the place of art as geography and geography as a place of art) in its planimetric abstraction, in the imaginary tracing of meridians, parallels, planispheres, etc. and, simultaneously, to problematize the cultural, historical, political an d social delimitations), to articulate a territorial discourse in which to confront the concepts of identity and otherness, national culture, the place of the artist in society, the constitution of the circuit of art in Brazil and its position in th e wor ld. They are pieces such as Local da ação (1979 - 80), Local com olas e meridianos (2004), Local com río Amazonas (1995 - 2006), or Espaço social da arte (1980), together with Fronteiriços, Situações - limite , Bureaucracy , Rrollos , some of the most significant p ieces of this the first individual exhibition in Spain in 2014 and that took place in our gallery. The artist reveals the contradictions of the representational system of culture and mistrusts the pedagogical mission of the image of the native of Brazil, a n issue that is reflected in one of the most emblematic works of the artist Brasil Nativo / Brasil Alienigena (1977).
The 70s are a stage of deep debate in the relationship between Brazilian culture (peripheral) and European and North American cultures (c entralized). With her hybrid maps, visionaries and critics, full of an anticolonial clamor, Anna Bella endorses the well - known maxim of the Uruguayan Torres García, who, proposing a map of Latin America upside down, proclaimed that the South is the North, and viceversa. The whole of her work reflects the idea of decolonization. This concern of the artist relates the cultural identity with the lived space, so evident and coherent with our current political map.
Encouraged by the issues raised by conceptua l art and the political moment lived, her production of the 1970s is marked by an eminently experimental nature: gravure, photomontage photography, silkscreen, photocopy, postcards, video, Super 8, what the It later leads to work a whole series of hybrid f orms (object - sculptures, engraving - object, object - photography, photo - collage, photo - installation, video - installation), in the sense of blurring borders between them and with the idea of passage , of the return to the nomadic, the exile and of continuous movement. Perhaps because she is the daughter of immigrants and living in Rio de Janeiro, she deals with the problems of adaptation, mimesis, exchange and ubiquity, the search for the global in the local and vice versa. In the works that dialogue with the conceptual aspects when investigating the ontological character of art, Anna Bella Geiger also interrogates the cultural and political systems that create and perpetuate art.
Geiger develops a contemporary poetics of space, but the doubly contemporary con dition of the artist is evident in the approach of the liberation of the autonomy of art and the specificity of the media as closed elements, keeping the pulse with each one of them in the attempt to establish interdependencies. Anna Bella, attracted by th e intimate and subjective character of the video, and the metalinguistic game, discusses the narratives of the television productions of that time, where consumption and passivity propagated by mass culture reproduced a vision contrary to everyday reality.
The video is an experimentation tool. This is evidenced by the "dirtiness" of the quality of the image and the ambient sound. It uses the technological device to record an action - operation where it faces the presence of another border, that of time. Here the artist is the protagonist of three actions that are not conceived as performances, since the use of the body is not conceived as a means of personal expression or as a support - but as a simulacrum. The videos follow the path of irony, they become sym bols of resistance and protest towards the military regime. All of this indicates that Anna Bella Geiger adopts a critical stance elaborated through the series, variation, mutation and repetition, issues that allow her to develop through video or engraving as propitious means to seriation and multiplicity, constituting the formal configuration of her work.

Press and VIP Preview:
January 11, 3pm – 9pm