38º Panorama da Arte Brasileira: Mil Graus [38th Panorama of Brazilian Art], 2024, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo, installation view
2025. 38º Panorama da Arte Brasileira
For the recurring exhibition Panorama da Arte Brasileira, launched in 1969, the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM) invites curators to present their perspectives on the current state of Brazilian art. Often these shows have been lackluster affairs, rather conventional in outlook, typically neglecting anything truly dissonant or dissident. But for this year’s thirty-eighth program, curators Germano Dushá, Thiago de Paula Souza, and Ariana Nuala disrupted that tendency, proposing a hopeful and high-intensity aesthetic reflecting the country’s inflamed cultural hybridisms.
As indicated by the title, “Mil Graus” (A Thousand Degrees), extreme heat was the guide for gathering and critique. Such heat is presumably strong enough to dissolve any possible material, preconceived epistemology, environmental stability, or spiritual order. Our present already smolders in extreme conditions: Frederico Filippi’s Moquém – Carnes de caça (Moquém – Game Meats), 2023–24—a scatter installation composed of strip-mining machinery with tractor parts burned in illegal mines in the Brazilian Amazon—presents a faithful portrait of the ecopolitical catastrophe that is already ongoing.
Due to renovation in the MAM building, “Mil Graus” was held at the premises of Museu de Arte Contemporânea, just across the street. In the entrance mezzanine, Adriano Amaral’s impactful installation Cabeça D’Água (Flash Flood), 2024, welcomed visitors into an octagonal chamber with cyborg-like objects made of silicone, burned soccer cleats, and goose feet hanging on the walls. Meanwhile, in a central baptismal font, viscous fluid stirred by a pneumatic motor affixed to the ceiling repeatedly submerged and uncovered several skulls—the effect suggesting an anabolized, mystical update of Bruce Nauman’s 3 Heads Fountain (3 Andrews), 2005.
“Mil Graus” presented arts of the sort that have rarely been exhibited in any previous edition of Panorama or the São Paulo Bienal, including works made by members of carnival troupes, practitioners of Indigenous and Afro-diasporic religions, and artists whose work has been sidelined as naive or folkloric. Also present were institutionally celebrated names, among them Solange Pessoa, who presented soapstone sculptures with encrusted spirals on the museum’s external loggia, and Lucas Arruda, with vaporous oil paintings in a small, silent Albertian chapel built specifically for the show.
Reflecting what anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls “cannibal metaphysics,” a group of works by Rop Cateh, a collective of Indigenous Akroá-Gamella people, foregrounded expressions of Amerindian perspectivism. In their photo collage Rop, 2024, a jaguar’s head is intercut with part of a man’s, including his eyes, and the head is surrounded by the silhouette of a feather headdress. Mineral/animal transfiguration is also embodied in Maria Lira Marques’s symbolic paintings using earthy natural pigments on stones from the central region of Brazil. For Animais e Ornamentos (Animals and Ornaments), 2024—sculptures of metamorphic animals such as birds, horses, and alligators—Marina Woisky took illustrations from books on natural history, applied arts, and tapestry and printed them on sewn fabrics filled with concrete, as if artificially fossilized.
The heat of the streets is the context for Gabriel Massan’s Baile do Terror (Dance of Terror), 2022–24, an immersive installation of a digital universe that denounces Brazilian police violence at funk dances. MEXA, a group that critically fights for LGBTQI+ rights, also zeroed in on celebratory resistance amid atrocious violence: At the show’s opening, they staged A última ceia (abertura) (The Last Supper [Opening]), a participatory performance involving the group’s dozen members and the audience at a long table set with food and drinks in a parodic re-creation of Leonardo’s famous mural.
If one thinks back to the previous edition of Panorama, “Sob as cinzas, brasa” (Under the ashes, embers) in 2022—which also touched on tropes of burning and heat in critiquing colonial history and Brazilian modernism—it becomes clear that what counts in an exhibition of this nature is not its theme but its curatorial construction. Whereas the “ashes” of the 2022 Panorama radiated—weakly—a residual languid heat, “Mil Graus” blared with agonizing and transcendental sounds of bodies hissing in absolute fervor.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 63, no. 6, February 2025
As indicated by the title, “Mil Graus” (A Thousand Degrees), extreme heat was the guide for gathering and critique. Such heat is presumably strong enough to dissolve any possible material, preconceived epistemology, environmental stability, or spiritual order. Our present already smolders in extreme conditions: Frederico Filippi’s Moquém – Carnes de caça (Moquém – Game Meats), 2023–24—a scatter installation composed of strip-mining machinery with tractor parts burned in illegal mines in the Brazilian Amazon—presents a faithful portrait of the ecopolitical catastrophe that is already ongoing.
Due to renovation in the MAM building, “Mil Graus” was held at the premises of Museu de Arte Contemporânea, just across the street. In the entrance mezzanine, Adriano Amaral’s impactful installation Cabeça D’Água (Flash Flood), 2024, welcomed visitors into an octagonal chamber with cyborg-like objects made of silicone, burned soccer cleats, and goose feet hanging on the walls. Meanwhile, in a central baptismal font, viscous fluid stirred by a pneumatic motor affixed to the ceiling repeatedly submerged and uncovered several skulls—the effect suggesting an anabolized, mystical update of Bruce Nauman’s 3 Heads Fountain (3 Andrews), 2005.
“Mil Graus” presented arts of the sort that have rarely been exhibited in any previous edition of Panorama or the São Paulo Bienal, including works made by members of carnival troupes, practitioners of Indigenous and Afro-diasporic religions, and artists whose work has been sidelined as naive or folkloric. Also present were institutionally celebrated names, among them Solange Pessoa, who presented soapstone sculptures with encrusted spirals on the museum’s external loggia, and Lucas Arruda, with vaporous oil paintings in a small, silent Albertian chapel built specifically for the show.
Reflecting what anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls “cannibal metaphysics,” a group of works by Rop Cateh, a collective of Indigenous Akroá-Gamella people, foregrounded expressions of Amerindian perspectivism. In their photo collage Rop, 2024, a jaguar’s head is intercut with part of a man’s, including his eyes, and the head is surrounded by the silhouette of a feather headdress. Mineral/animal transfiguration is also embodied in Maria Lira Marques’s symbolic paintings using earthy natural pigments on stones from the central region of Brazil. For Animais e Ornamentos (Animals and Ornaments), 2024—sculptures of metamorphic animals such as birds, horses, and alligators—Marina Woisky took illustrations from books on natural history, applied arts, and tapestry and printed them on sewn fabrics filled with concrete, as if artificially fossilized.
The heat of the streets is the context for Gabriel Massan’s Baile do Terror (Dance of Terror), 2022–24, an immersive installation of a digital universe that denounces Brazilian police violence at funk dances. MEXA, a group that critically fights for LGBTQI+ rights, also zeroed in on celebratory resistance amid atrocious violence: At the show’s opening, they staged A última ceia (abertura) (The Last Supper [Opening]), a participatory performance involving the group’s dozen members and the audience at a long table set with food and drinks in a parodic re-creation of Leonardo’s famous mural.
If one thinks back to the previous edition of Panorama, “Sob as cinzas, brasa” (Under the ashes, embers) in 2022—which also touched on tropes of burning and heat in critiquing colonial history and Brazilian modernism—it becomes clear that what counts in an exhibition of this nature is not its theme but its curatorial construction. Whereas the “ashes” of the 2022 Panorama radiated—weakly—a residual languid heat, “Mil Graus” blared with agonizing and transcendental sounds of bodies hissing in absolute fervor.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 63, no. 6, February 2025
38º Panorama da Arte Brasileira: Mil Graus [38th Panorama of Brazilian Art], 2024, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo, installation view
38º Panorama da Arte Brasileira: Mil Graus [38th Panorama of Brazilian Art], 2024, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo, installation view
38º Panorama da Arte Brasileira: Mil Graus [38th Panorama of Brazilian Art], 2024, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo, installation view
38º Panorama da Arte Brasileira: Mil Graus [38th Panorama of Brazilian Art], 2024, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo, installation view
38º Panorama da Arte Brasileira: Mil Graus [38th Panorama of Brazilian Art], 2024, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo, installation view