Froiid, Carnavais na Bienal [Carnivals at the Biennial], 2025, Bienal do Mercosul: Estalo, Porto Alegre, 2025, installation view
2025. Bienal do Mercosul
Catchy and seemingly accessible, Estalo (Snap, a symbolic gesture of movement and transformation) is the title of the vibrant 14th edition of the Bienal do Mercosul—often overlooked on the international circuit. With a few exceptions, the featured artists hail from the Global South, revealing synchronous yet diverse modes through which the contemporary panorama unfolds. The curatorial endeavor is broad in scope and, at times, exhaustive: seventy-seven artists, with an impressive number of works commissioned specifically for the exhibition, spread across eighteen venues throughout Porto Alegre. Organizing a biennial under the umbrella of a South American trade bloc exposes the artificiality of certain geopolitical frameworks—such as the very notion of Latin America—by amalgamating regional specificities and universal themes. This inquisitive approach toward a broader geography aligns with the critical vision of Raphael Fonseca, chief curator of this edition—who, in a striking recent essay¹, thoroughly challenged the parameters that try to artificially contain “Latin American art”—alongside adjunct curators Tiago Sant’Ana and Yina Jiménez Suriel.
Although the curatorial concept gestures toward a plurality of languages and contexts embodied by the artists, Estalo seems to follow a familiar philosophical maneuver: the conceptualization of a minimal entity that, by constituting and permeating everything, becomes totalizing—like the atom, the monad, the pixel, or even the glitch. While the snap also suggests a connection between two things or moments, it simultaneously marks the subtle threshold that divides them. The biennial’s thematic definition resides in the very questioning of boundaries—an ontological inquiry into the possibility of conceptualization itself. The difference here seems to lie within phenomenology: the snap centers on human experience rather than epistemological concerns, unlike, say, atomic theory. But in practice, the theme proves not only vast—as it intends to be, according to the curatorial text²—but also loose.
The exhibition’s cores (also called “snaps”) are not thematic categories or conceptual frameworks, but rather nostalgic, memory-infused scenes, described in phrases such as “an out-of-signal TV hissing in the living room late at night” or “the crackling of the wooden floor in my house that comes with the summer heat.” These poetic fragments—eighteen of them, one for each venue—attempt to offer thematic groups within an all-encompassing concept, yet they sometimes gather excellent works under tenuous or unconvincing conceptual links. For instance, the gathering of Claudia Alarcón’s textile works, such as El río guiado por Tokjuaj (The River Guided by Tokjuaj [2025]), Yunchul Kim’s Dust of Suns II (2022), a luminescent robotic sculpture, and Marina Rheingantz’s Fuleragem (2022) with a few diffuse abstract landscapes attempts to draw connections between embroidery stitches, synthetic polymers in viscous fluids, and clusters of color in oil painting, but with limited conceptual traction. The works differ in their techniques and production contexts more than they connect via a minimum shared operational element.
By activating so many venues across Porto Alegre, the exhibition recognizes its resilient and formative art institutions—many of them independent—and deploys a high-powered comeback after the devastating floods last year that destroyed part of the city, ruined some museum collections, and postponed the biennial. In choosing to focus on global ecological crises instead of addressing this specific environmental disaster, the biennial reaffirms its expansive will even as its relationship with the city remains fragile, raising the question of whether the exhibition might just as easily be transplanted elsewhere. What could be seen as a geographically hyperconnected production ends up failing to establish compelling dialogues with its host city. Furthermore, the major commissioned works, which appear to serve as focal points of the curatorial cores, prioritize the voices of artists from outside Porto Alegre over those of local artists. (This even makes me question whether some pertinent relation with the host city is a solid point for experiencing/reading a biennial when geographical frontiers are anything but solid.)
Even though they don’t compose a coherent choir, a few names reference the force and importance of the artistic production of Rio Grande do Sul, the state of which Porto Alegre is the capital: Iberê Camargo’s Solidão (Loneliness [1994]), a large-scale oil painting with ghostlike figures, is the artist’s last work, unfinished due to his passing, stressing the snap between life and death. (The additional showing of twenty-two picturesque drawings and paintings on paper by Camargo depicting cats from the 1950s to 1993 bears little relation to the biennial’s theme and seems to fulfill an institutional obligation to the foundation that carries his name.) This macabre and enchanting tone finds resonance in Letícia Lopes’s fascinating paintings of shadowy figures in esoteric metamorphosis from the series Suíte Esfinge (Sphinx Suite [2022–25]). The Afro-diasporic presence in southern Brazil, often overlooked at the national level, is evoked in powerful works by Djalma do Alegrete such as Unidentified title (Oxalufã with Opaxorê and White Globe [1993]) that summon the aesthetics of orishas (divine spirits in the Yoruba religion). Representing the artistic experimentation of the 1980s, mainly with respect to techniques and media, Claudio Goulart’s lyrical and intimate video installation Night and Day (I think of you) (1983) involves a ballad playing in a dark room with starburst light spheres and vinyl records, invoking cosmological vastness—and, even when contemplating the universe, the loneliness of longing for a lost loved one.
Rodrigo Cass, Marcus Deusdedit, and Felipe Rezende deploy impressive newly commissioned pieces in three different venues, emphasizing the diversity of the exhibition spaces. In a compelling dialogue with the geometry of the Fundação Iberê Camargo building, designed by Álvaro Siza, Cass presents a powerful body of work that merges painting and video. Projected onto irregular, monochromatic prisms covered in dyed linen—or, in the case of Mística Amorosa (Loving Mysticism [2024]), with one face gilded in gold leaf—the videos show the artist’s body performing repetitive actions for several minutes. Exploring the emotional potential of geometry and its affective relationship to the legacy of Brazilian Concretism and Neo-Concretism, Cass also exhibits meticulously crafted paintings made of pigmented concrete, applied layer by layer in successive brushstrokes, each respecting the drying and hardening time of the one previous. The work unfolds through an expanded sense of time and a convergence of disparate media—performance’s sensibility, spatial expansion, and the physical rigor of concrete and geometry.
At Usina do Gasômetro, Marcus Deusdedit also explores an articulation with architecture. His installation Listening to a Lot of Trap Music While Designing Interior – Prototypes (2024–25) showcases a series of furniture prototypes designed by the artist—who is also an architect—alongside a propagandistic mockumentary promoting these objects. Deusdedit frames them as traps: while playing on the dual meaning of “trap” to reference trap music (a subgenre of hip-hop), the film’s protagonist is a salesman provocatively named after Lúcio Costa, the Brazilian architect and urban planner who designed Brasília in the 1950s, presenting the furniture pieces as symbols of how modern Brazilian architecture has historically perpetuated racism and segregation by transposing Eurocentric models of shaping space and urban life in an unequal, colonialized reality. The work directly critiques the ways this architectural legacy has denied Black individuals access to certain spatial and functional elements, despite their foundational roles in processes of design, construction, and supervision. A door, a side table, a headboard, a lounge chair, and a mirror echo actions historically forbidden to people of color: to enter and exit, to possess and grab, to rest, and to contemplate.
At Fundação Vera Chaves Barcellos—located more than twenty kilometers from downtown Porto Alegre—is presented Felipe Rezende’s Demeter (2025). Named after the Greek goddess of agriculture and the ill-fated ship in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) that carries soil from the vampire’s homeland, the installation gestures to the complex negotiations behind transporting one and a half tons of earth from Rezende’s parents’ property in Barreiras, a rural town in Bahia shaped by agribusiness, to Porto Alegre. Investigating the labor dynamics underpinning Brazil’s rural sector, Rezende hired a friend and truck driver who, over four days and more than 2,600 kilometers, drove the load across the country with a stop in Louveira, in São Paulo’s countryside. There, the artist covered the truck with a tarp stitched together from oil paintings depicting scenes and graphics related to Brazilian farming. The earth was later unloaded directly onto the floor of the exhibition room, covered by the painted tarp structure, and flanked by a sign reading “Demeter” in a Gothic-style font—the same one affixed to the truck’s rear throughout the journey.
Yet, although the works by Cass, Deusdedit, and Rezende are strong, their engagement with the snap remains unclear. This occurs frequently throughout this edition, revealing a lack of coherence in the Biennial’s overarching framework.
One of the biennial’s most articulate contributions is the identification of a historical and contextual arc linking the digital image production of the 1980s to today’s dizzying visual flux. At the Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul (MARGS), which houses the “snap” titled “the sliding of grains of sand at the bottom of an hourglass,” Gretchen Bender’s remarkable Dumping Core (1984) illustrates the context of digital image generation forty years ago. Bender, a pioneer in the intersection of computer graphics, video, and Marxist and feminist critique in the United States, presents a darkened room filled with thirteen video monitors playing a four-channel work. The radicality of the piece lies in its confrontation with 1980s visual culture and the theatrical, computational nature of its imagery. The installation resonates with the contemporary impulse to insert complex organic forms—such as faces or intricate floral patterns—into digital image fields, while also naturalizing entirely synthetic elements, like the ABC News logo, which Bender presents as celestial symbols or iconic deities.
In the adjacent room, the other end of this spectrum is explored in Froiid’s Carnivals at the Biennial (2025), which revisits the legacy of samba singer and painter Heitor dos Prazeres through a sound installation that uses real-time computer-generated music blending different arrangements, rhythms, and instruments. The piece includes one hundred illustrations in antique-esque frames inspired by dos Prazeres’s Frevo (1964), though with less compelling aesthetic refinement. Despite their differences in conceptual and formal maturity, Bender’s and Froiid’s installations construct one of the biennial’s most pertinent arguments: both works map (across two radically different technological and geopolitical eras) how artists engage with cutting-edge digital-image-generation tools.
This pairing seems to exemplify the biennial’s overall approach: an attempt to crystallize, in endless fractals, a generational awareness of glitch aesthetics, the obsolescence of binary thinking, hyperconnected geographies shaped by the internet, cultural hybridities, and the reception of epistemologies beyond the Eurocentric canon. It employs a “chronically online” visual grammar, characterized by a vertiginous flux structured by overwhelming, fast-paced images—perhaps more concerned with impact and velocity than with enduring contribution or sustained narrative. Yet the sheer scope of the theme seems to overreach, resembling a catchall umbrella under which anything might fit—similar to the 2024 edition of the Venice Biennale. Unlike Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, in which an apathetic and orderly impetus prevailed, Estalo does not shy away from presenting powerful and high-intensity works, even if it struggles to articulate cohesive through lines.
Notes
[1] Raphael Fonseca, “From rakatá to rakatá,” in Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now (New York: Phaidon, 2023), 11–17.
[2] “The term designates many situations in which a sudden movement changes the ongoing state of different materials and, possibly, generates sounds of different vibrations... If some of the research at the biennale is explosive due to its agitated, abrupt and iconophilic social context, other artists create visualities that, even though they seem quieter, just because they exist, can be seen as an ‘estalo.’” From the biennial’s website: https://www.bienalmercosul.art.br/en/conceito.
Text originally published in Mousse, April 2025
Although the curatorial concept gestures toward a plurality of languages and contexts embodied by the artists, Estalo seems to follow a familiar philosophical maneuver: the conceptualization of a minimal entity that, by constituting and permeating everything, becomes totalizing—like the atom, the monad, the pixel, or even the glitch. While the snap also suggests a connection between two things or moments, it simultaneously marks the subtle threshold that divides them. The biennial’s thematic definition resides in the very questioning of boundaries—an ontological inquiry into the possibility of conceptualization itself. The difference here seems to lie within phenomenology: the snap centers on human experience rather than epistemological concerns, unlike, say, atomic theory. But in practice, the theme proves not only vast—as it intends to be, according to the curatorial text²—but also loose.
The exhibition’s cores (also called “snaps”) are not thematic categories or conceptual frameworks, but rather nostalgic, memory-infused scenes, described in phrases such as “an out-of-signal TV hissing in the living room late at night” or “the crackling of the wooden floor in my house that comes with the summer heat.” These poetic fragments—eighteen of them, one for each venue—attempt to offer thematic groups within an all-encompassing concept, yet they sometimes gather excellent works under tenuous or unconvincing conceptual links. For instance, the gathering of Claudia Alarcón’s textile works, such as El río guiado por Tokjuaj (The River Guided by Tokjuaj [2025]), Yunchul Kim’s Dust of Suns II (2022), a luminescent robotic sculpture, and Marina Rheingantz’s Fuleragem (2022) with a few diffuse abstract landscapes attempts to draw connections between embroidery stitches, synthetic polymers in viscous fluids, and clusters of color in oil painting, but with limited conceptual traction. The works differ in their techniques and production contexts more than they connect via a minimum shared operational element.
By activating so many venues across Porto Alegre, the exhibition recognizes its resilient and formative art institutions—many of them independent—and deploys a high-powered comeback after the devastating floods last year that destroyed part of the city, ruined some museum collections, and postponed the biennial. In choosing to focus on global ecological crises instead of addressing this specific environmental disaster, the biennial reaffirms its expansive will even as its relationship with the city remains fragile, raising the question of whether the exhibition might just as easily be transplanted elsewhere. What could be seen as a geographically hyperconnected production ends up failing to establish compelling dialogues with its host city. Furthermore, the major commissioned works, which appear to serve as focal points of the curatorial cores, prioritize the voices of artists from outside Porto Alegre over those of local artists. (This even makes me question whether some pertinent relation with the host city is a solid point for experiencing/reading a biennial when geographical frontiers are anything but solid.)
Even though they don’t compose a coherent choir, a few names reference the force and importance of the artistic production of Rio Grande do Sul, the state of which Porto Alegre is the capital: Iberê Camargo’s Solidão (Loneliness [1994]), a large-scale oil painting with ghostlike figures, is the artist’s last work, unfinished due to his passing, stressing the snap between life and death. (The additional showing of twenty-two picturesque drawings and paintings on paper by Camargo depicting cats from the 1950s to 1993 bears little relation to the biennial’s theme and seems to fulfill an institutional obligation to the foundation that carries his name.) This macabre and enchanting tone finds resonance in Letícia Lopes’s fascinating paintings of shadowy figures in esoteric metamorphosis from the series Suíte Esfinge (Sphinx Suite [2022–25]). The Afro-diasporic presence in southern Brazil, often overlooked at the national level, is evoked in powerful works by Djalma do Alegrete such as Unidentified title (Oxalufã with Opaxorê and White Globe [1993]) that summon the aesthetics of orishas (divine spirits in the Yoruba religion). Representing the artistic experimentation of the 1980s, mainly with respect to techniques and media, Claudio Goulart’s lyrical and intimate video installation Night and Day (I think of you) (1983) involves a ballad playing in a dark room with starburst light spheres and vinyl records, invoking cosmological vastness—and, even when contemplating the universe, the loneliness of longing for a lost loved one.
Rodrigo Cass, Marcus Deusdedit, and Felipe Rezende deploy impressive newly commissioned pieces in three different venues, emphasizing the diversity of the exhibition spaces. In a compelling dialogue with the geometry of the Fundação Iberê Camargo building, designed by Álvaro Siza, Cass presents a powerful body of work that merges painting and video. Projected onto irregular, monochromatic prisms covered in dyed linen—or, in the case of Mística Amorosa (Loving Mysticism [2024]), with one face gilded in gold leaf—the videos show the artist’s body performing repetitive actions for several minutes. Exploring the emotional potential of geometry and its affective relationship to the legacy of Brazilian Concretism and Neo-Concretism, Cass also exhibits meticulously crafted paintings made of pigmented concrete, applied layer by layer in successive brushstrokes, each respecting the drying and hardening time of the one previous. The work unfolds through an expanded sense of time and a convergence of disparate media—performance’s sensibility, spatial expansion, and the physical rigor of concrete and geometry.
At Usina do Gasômetro, Marcus Deusdedit also explores an articulation with architecture. His installation Listening to a Lot of Trap Music While Designing Interior – Prototypes (2024–25) showcases a series of furniture prototypes designed by the artist—who is also an architect—alongside a propagandistic mockumentary promoting these objects. Deusdedit frames them as traps: while playing on the dual meaning of “trap” to reference trap music (a subgenre of hip-hop), the film’s protagonist is a salesman provocatively named after Lúcio Costa, the Brazilian architect and urban planner who designed Brasília in the 1950s, presenting the furniture pieces as symbols of how modern Brazilian architecture has historically perpetuated racism and segregation by transposing Eurocentric models of shaping space and urban life in an unequal, colonialized reality. The work directly critiques the ways this architectural legacy has denied Black individuals access to certain spatial and functional elements, despite their foundational roles in processes of design, construction, and supervision. A door, a side table, a headboard, a lounge chair, and a mirror echo actions historically forbidden to people of color: to enter and exit, to possess and grab, to rest, and to contemplate.
At Fundação Vera Chaves Barcellos—located more than twenty kilometers from downtown Porto Alegre—is presented Felipe Rezende’s Demeter (2025). Named after the Greek goddess of agriculture and the ill-fated ship in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) that carries soil from the vampire’s homeland, the installation gestures to the complex negotiations behind transporting one and a half tons of earth from Rezende’s parents’ property in Barreiras, a rural town in Bahia shaped by agribusiness, to Porto Alegre. Investigating the labor dynamics underpinning Brazil’s rural sector, Rezende hired a friend and truck driver who, over four days and more than 2,600 kilometers, drove the load across the country with a stop in Louveira, in São Paulo’s countryside. There, the artist covered the truck with a tarp stitched together from oil paintings depicting scenes and graphics related to Brazilian farming. The earth was later unloaded directly onto the floor of the exhibition room, covered by the painted tarp structure, and flanked by a sign reading “Demeter” in a Gothic-style font—the same one affixed to the truck’s rear throughout the journey.
Yet, although the works by Cass, Deusdedit, and Rezende are strong, their engagement with the snap remains unclear. This occurs frequently throughout this edition, revealing a lack of coherence in the Biennial’s overarching framework.
One of the biennial’s most articulate contributions is the identification of a historical and contextual arc linking the digital image production of the 1980s to today’s dizzying visual flux. At the Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul (MARGS), which houses the “snap” titled “the sliding of grains of sand at the bottom of an hourglass,” Gretchen Bender’s remarkable Dumping Core (1984) illustrates the context of digital image generation forty years ago. Bender, a pioneer in the intersection of computer graphics, video, and Marxist and feminist critique in the United States, presents a darkened room filled with thirteen video monitors playing a four-channel work. The radicality of the piece lies in its confrontation with 1980s visual culture and the theatrical, computational nature of its imagery. The installation resonates with the contemporary impulse to insert complex organic forms—such as faces or intricate floral patterns—into digital image fields, while also naturalizing entirely synthetic elements, like the ABC News logo, which Bender presents as celestial symbols or iconic deities.
In the adjacent room, the other end of this spectrum is explored in Froiid’s Carnivals at the Biennial (2025), which revisits the legacy of samba singer and painter Heitor dos Prazeres through a sound installation that uses real-time computer-generated music blending different arrangements, rhythms, and instruments. The piece includes one hundred illustrations in antique-esque frames inspired by dos Prazeres’s Frevo (1964), though with less compelling aesthetic refinement. Despite their differences in conceptual and formal maturity, Bender’s and Froiid’s installations construct one of the biennial’s most pertinent arguments: both works map (across two radically different technological and geopolitical eras) how artists engage with cutting-edge digital-image-generation tools.
This pairing seems to exemplify the biennial’s overall approach: an attempt to crystallize, in endless fractals, a generational awareness of glitch aesthetics, the obsolescence of binary thinking, hyperconnected geographies shaped by the internet, cultural hybridities, and the reception of epistemologies beyond the Eurocentric canon. It employs a “chronically online” visual grammar, characterized by a vertiginous flux structured by overwhelming, fast-paced images—perhaps more concerned with impact and velocity than with enduring contribution or sustained narrative. Yet the sheer scope of the theme seems to overreach, resembling a catchall umbrella under which anything might fit—similar to the 2024 edition of the Venice Biennale. Unlike Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, in which an apathetic and orderly impetus prevailed, Estalo does not shy away from presenting powerful and high-intensity works, even if it struggles to articulate cohesive through lines.
Notes
[1] Raphael Fonseca, “From rakatá to rakatá,” in Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now (New York: Phaidon, 2023), 11–17.
[2] “The term designates many situations in which a sudden movement changes the ongoing state of different materials and, possibly, generates sounds of different vibrations... If some of the research at the biennale is explosive due to its agitated, abrupt and iconophilic social context, other artists create visualities that, even though they seem quieter, just because they exist, can be seen as an ‘estalo.’” From the biennial’s website: https://www.bienalmercosul.art.br/en/conceito.
Text originally published in Mousse, April 2025