35th São Paulo Bienal
06.09 - 10.12.2023
A new enlightenment is sweeping through that sub-class of the bourgeoisie that is the contemporary art world. You may have heard of it. It is a way of thinking comprising not isms but alities: materiality, temporality, corporeality, sensorality, spirituality. It is distrustful of representation, but fixed firmly in identity, specifically that of the oppressed. It sees time not as progressive or even linear, but helical. It understands that the world is marked by histories of colonial and patriarchal violence, but it does not want to trade in violent imagery. Instead, it lingers in absence, erasure and lack. The syllabus is that of the Black North American intellectuals writing lyrically about the “terrible beauty” of the transatlantic diaspora: Saidiyah Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Dionne Brand. Its politics are not organised around the 19th century pursuit of “freedom” and “liberty,” nor the “liberation” and “solidarity” of the 20th. “Justice” and “transformation,” the refrain of our parents’ generation, is similarly eschewed. “Decolonisation,” a word we picked up when we were students, has also been discarded. Instead, this is a politics of “collectivity” and “collaboration.” Indeed, it falls more in the camp of ethics and epistemology than in the realm of politics, traditionally understood. If it is a politics, it is a politics not of movements but gestures. If it is a revolution, it is a revolution happening on the level of poetics. A revolution of discourse, affect and minor acts of resistance. It is this enlightenment that is guiding the various collectives of curators (and they are almost always collectives) that I met over the course of one week in São Paulo on the occasion of choreographies of the impossible, the 35th edition of the São Paulo Bienal.
I say this not to be jaded, but to step back and remark with no small amount of awe that the wheel of history has well and truly turned — and the financiers and politicians of this troubled country are willing to pay for it. Not that I’m complaining! The Bienal brokered a deal to put 10 of us art journalists up in the Rosewood, a five-star hotel in Bela Vista (due in part to a mutual connection with the Matarazzo family). For this critic, who still remembers getting excited about a petrol reimbursement for a trip to Stellenbosch, a little bit of spoiling goes a long way. And the fact that an exhibition of this scale is 55% funded by the government — enabling free entry for the public, educational programmes and commissions of large-scale conceptual work — is a marvel for me, a visitor from a country where the state is ambivalent, at best, about the arts and culture.
Ibrahim Mahama, Parliament of Ghosts, 2023. Exhibition view of the 35th Bienal de São Paulo – choreographies of the impossible © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.
Marvel is what I did, by and large, at the Bienal, which was curated by Diane Lima, Grada Kilomba, Hélio Menezes and Manuel Borja-Villel in a decidedly non-hierarchal structure. With regards to the enlightenment, it featured all the usual suspects: family archives (Aline Motta, Rosana Paulino), historically-charged tapestries (Sonia Gomes, Mounira Al Solh), earth-mounds (Ana Pi, Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro) and site-specific installations, by which I mean installations about sites (Ibrahim Mahama, Igshaan Adams). But all of these are done to such a degree of magnitude and excellence that one can hardly say, “I’ve seen this before.”
Take the latter two artists as examples (both of whom I’ve seen many times before). Mahama’s work, a reprise of 2019’s Parliament of Ghosts, sees one hundred or so upturned terra cotta pots in various stages of degradation and disrepair gathered at the entrance to the pavilion and alongside eighty-five metres of old railway tracks. My sense is that the pots are spirits who are waiting for a train to take them to the afterlife. That train, the redeemer, does not arrive. At this scale, where the vessels come up to my hip, I believe that, were I to crouch down beside them for a rest, I too might fuse into ceramic. These are the ghosts. What of the parliament? Well, in addition to all of this, Mahama has recreated, brick by brick, the bleachers of the inner courtyard of his Red Clay Studio. With visitors reluctant to sit and pause, this meeting place remained perennially empty. A breeze brushed through the open windows, and the voices of Ana Pi and Taata Kwa Nkisi Mutá Imê haunted from the sound work nearby: “To speak of tempo is to speak of life itself / to speak of the past / to speak of ancestors / to speak of the present now yesterday after.” As much as I have made fun of the enlightenment for its temporality fetish – its love of convoluted show titles like Still Here Tomorrow To High-Five You Yesterday, The Future Is Behind Us and Tomorrow There Will Be More of Us – I could not shake the feeling that there really were ghosts all around us, edging us to make history so that we might usher them into the past.
Adams’ work similarly takes a god’s-eye view of the histories of the present, honing in on the desire lines working class Capetonians forge through the carceral quadrants that make up apartheid-era spatial planning. Regarding it, I feel my eye expand to imbibe the atmosphere of twinkling clouds and threadbare footpaths, then contract to relish in the intricate, pearlescent details. When I tell Adams about this contraction and expansion – this “throb of my eye,” as I describe – he confesses to me that he has imagined Samesyn (2023) to be “the lungs of the show.” Yes! That’s exactly it! Not a throb, but a breath. Coincidentally, the work is smack dab in the middle of the Bienal – in the centre of the second floor – precisely where the lungs, if the exhibition were a body, ought to be.
Igshaan Adams, Samesyn, 2023. Exhibition view of the 35th Bienal de São Paulo – choreographies of the impossible © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.
With this thought in mind, I begin to see it everywhere: the exhibition as a body. On the ground floor, Katherine Dunham’s archival footage of performers dancing the cumbia, the washerwoman, the shango and the charm dance for L’Ag’Ya are the feet, while the hands are Maya Deren’s Meditation on Violence (1948), in which Chao-Li Chi performs the Wu-Tang ritual with the ambivalence of grace. Kidlat Tahimik’s large scale sculptures are the legs of gods who have walked the cosmos and returned with a few souvenirs. I imagine Torkwase Dyson’s monumental Blackbasebeingbeyond (2023) as the joints – elbows, shoulders, knees – especially those that laboured to build the very monuments that the work critiques.
Onto the second floor, where Adams’ lungs pump. Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied (1989) is the heart pulsating with as much anger as there is water in the body, to paraphrase a line from the film. A blood-red painted room contains Citra Sasmita’s Timur Mirah Project IX: Beyond the Realm of Senses (Oracle and Demons), which is all about the arteries and veins that connect tree to woman to snake to hair to sun to skin.
There are various installations and video works stored in dark rooms that have been built into the middle of the galleries specifically for this Bienal. I imagine these as the innards, digesting. Nadir Bouhmouch and Soumeya Ait Ahmed’s Seasonal Work Song is a stomach that hungers for justice in the apple orchards of Morocco, and Daniel Lie’s “installation-entity” is the colon, what with its decomposing chrysanthemums, sprouting fungi and overall odour of rot. Guadelupe Maravilla’s gongs act as the vocal cords, emitting healing frequencies from their feathered throats.
Daniel Lie, Outres, 2023. Exhibition view of the 35th Bienal de São Paulo – choreographies of the impossible © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.
The top floor is the head, where the memory-work is stored. Accordingly, you will find here historical works (such as fragments of a codex inscribed by a Nahua interpreter called Malinche in the 1540s), works that remember (such as various ephemera from the Argentinian Archivo de la Memoria Trans) and works that comment on memory (such as Santu Mofokeng’s Black Photo Album: Look At Me).
Gloria Anzaldúa, The New Mestiza Nation: A Multicultural Movement, 1992. © The Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Literary Trust.
What am I missing? The face: eyes, ears, mouth, nose. I could interpret this literally and remark on a portrait by Aurora Cursino dos Santos, or go abstract and say that the tapestry compiled by the Colectivo Ayllu is an attempt to pastiche a collective profile. But I prefer a little sketch by Gloria Anzaldúa that situates the eyes in the mounds of the hand, the mouth in the palm and the ear beside the pinky finger. This is what choreographies of the impossible is all about, seeing not just with one’s eyes, but with one’s body.
Does this metaphor have anything to do with the enlightenment I have tried to name? Well, it matters that this enlightenment wants to unlearn the enlightenment that preceded it – the one that said that the mind trumps the body, reason over emotion. “Body before capital!” the self-described anti-capitalist flamenco collective flo6x8 proclaim in their contribution to the Bienal.
What are the implications of this return to the body? If the pandemic taught us anything, it was that, when the body is under threat, so too is the world as we know it. Apply Adams’ method of expansion and contraction, and you might see what I mean. The sickness in ourselves served to reveal and amplify the sickness of our political systems; states and markets seemed everyday to unravel, scramble to reassemble themselves, unravel again. To protect our bodies, we isolated them, and the effects of this social atomisation are still felt; countries have turned inward, borders have been reinforced and public engagement has become increasingly mediated through machines that care not, in the end, whether or not a person survives. These stressors render our bodies even more vulnerable to death and disease, and a vicious cycle endures. The body and the social body. These are inextricably linked. Both are dying.
How do we recover? Can we? For the enlightenment thinkers, ‘healing’ is a word oft-uttered but seldom concurred. For some, healing is about personal responsibility; it’s self-care and therapy. For others, healing has to do with a spiritual renaissance, a reconnection with spirits and ancestors. Others still claim that there can be no healing without revolution. How this revolution is going to be mobilised, however, is a question endlessly debated and perennially deferred. “It is more about questions than answers,” is another line I’ve heard repeated by enlightened thinkers, and I tend to get impatient with this noncommittal trail of thought – how it, too, defers. But looking around at the artworks on display, I am moved to have faith in the question, the unknown, the impossible. Faith. In the face of death, perhaps faith is all that’s left.
Display of ex-votos at Museu Afro-Brasil. Photo by the author.
This reminds me of another series of objects I saw in São Paulo. The Museu Afro-Brasil, just a stone’s throw from the Bienal pavilion, houses a significant collection of ex-votos. These wood-carved sculptures depict, primarily, people, as well as body parts like hands and feet. Aesthetically speaking, they represent a syncretic link between the talismans of Vodou cosmology and Catholic icons of angels and saints. They are placed in churches, altars, statues and cemeteries to express devotion, pray for a miracle or give thanks for a blessing. They are oftentimes carved into the very thing for which the devotee wishes to pray. A heart for love. A foot for safe travels. An eye for clarity. The artworks in choreographies of the impossible are like these objects, these bodies, these gestures. They are mournful appeals not to a political authority, but to some god, some cosmic viewer – the angel of history, perhaps. They pray for healing. Will it come? I suspect that, like Mahama’s vessels, the enlightened are waiting patiently, devotedly, at the station, for redemption to arrive.
Aline Motta, Water is a Time Machine and Do Not Cut the Negatives, 2023. Exhibition view of the 35th Bienal de São Paulo – choreographies of the impossible © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.
