Guilherme Giufrida – författare

Centuries of art celebrating a global panorama of Indigenous culturesContinuing the work of the acclaimed Afro-Atlantic Histories, this publication from the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) compiles the collective curatorship and research carried out by artists and scholars from various territories and Indigenous groups in Australia, North America, South America and Scandinavia. For the traveling exhibition, MASP, in collaboration with Kode Bergen Art Museum, invited guest curators from Indigenous nations including Inuit, Maori and Sámi. With over 150 artists included, the featured artworks range from the historical to the contemporary—from 17th-century colonial religious paintings to modern film and video installations—in order to trace the impact of European colonization on Indigenous visual culture. Despite its scope, the aim of Indigenous Histories is not to fully represent the vast and complex histories of each region, but rather to provide a cross section, fragment or sample of these histories in a concise but relevant selection in order to create juxtapositions of these groups on a global scale. Incorporating traditional patterns, this beautifully designed book is divided into eight thematic sections: seven regional and one covering contemporary Indigenous activism. It features over 300 illustrations with narratives contextualized by the guest curators as well as museum directors from institutions around the world.Artists include: Abraham González Pacheco, Antonio Paucar, Britta Marakatt-Labba, Cristóbal Lozano, Iver Jåks, Frida Kahlo, Joar Nango, Katarina Spik Skum, Lena Stenberg, María Izquierdo, Maria Karlsen, Minerva Cuevas, Outi Pieski, Raisa Porsanger, Rufino Tamayo, Saturnino Herrán, Venuca Evanán.

Nearly four decades of work from the photographer who redefined the expression of gender in contemporary queer portraitureA leading voice in contemporary photography, Catherine Opie has been known for her portraits of the queer scene in California since the late 1980s. A fundamental element of Opie’s work is the observation of different gender performances through a critical revision of the genre of portraiture. Her photography emphasizes how portraiture has the power to both reinforce and deconstruct conventional and binary expressions of gender. The title of this publication and the MASP exhibition it accompanies is based on the double meaning of the word gênero in Portuguese, meaning both “gender” and “genre.”For her first solo show in Brazil, Opie enters into dialogue with the tradition of the portrait—a way of representing the human figure that dates to the 15th century in the West—producing an archive of diverse presentations of gender and sexuality. Around 60 photographs from her most iconic series are displayed alongside a selection of around 15 emblematic portraits from MASP’s collection. Strongly marked by figuration and the formal constraint of portraiture, the juxtaposition of these works accentuates the dialogues, tensions and reformulations that Opie’s photographic oeuvre proposes.Catherine Opie was born in Ohio in 1961 and is currently a professor of photography and the chair of the art department at UCLA. Opie’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe and Japan. She has had solo exhibitions of her work at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; St. Louis Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among many others.

Building objects with discarded items, plant parts and even her own body, Tossin’s mixed-media works make the disasters of climate change a realityInstead of portraying environmental catastrophe, Brazilian artist Clarissa Tossin (born 1973) seeks to incorporate its materiality, making artistic production from the residues of a collapsed world. The titular expression in this case refers to the moment in history when the effects of climate change will no longer be reversible.