An Act of Seeing that Unfolds

An Act of Seeing that Unfolds puts forward an approach to the Susana and Ricardo Steinbruch Collection, a major repertory of different temporalities and geographies centred, first and foremost, on Latin American contemporaneity — particularly Brazilian — and the artistic practices that transpired in Eastern Europe across the second half of the twentieth century.

The pieces selected for the show pivot around the theory of gestures coined by Czech-Brazilian thinker Vilém Flusser. For Flusser, these rituals of perception — which can seem minimal and not respond to a specific causation — not only make our own aesthetic and affective recognition possible, but also underpin a cartography of relations and crossovers that join seemingly disparate artists.

Therefore, a dialogical and non-linear survey is laid out, starting from a site-specific project by Fernanda Gomes and moving through anti-art movements in the former Yugoslavia, Neo-concretism and artistic responses that sparked political events in the 1960s and 1970s in the contexts mentioned. Equally, another setting is devoted to Mira Schendel and other unions are explored, for instance those which span the idea of territory or are installed inside experimentation with and from language.