Featuring the work of 14 emerging artists from the young Brazilian contemporary art scene, the exhibition aims to expand the discussion on Afro-diasporic genealogies from the perspective of migratory flows between ancestry and the future. In WATER MARKS: WE MUST REMEMBER, the ocean is understood as the essential base of immigration traffic in the history of the African diasporas between the seven seas and the capacity of water to compress genetic information that, today, moulds identities from different connections, whether spiritual, scientific or technological.
Through a multimedia presentation, including Gabriel Massan's 3D animations project the migration dystopia of the future onto the aquatic exodus, Laís Amaral's paintings celebrate the experiences of life and death driven by the continuation of existence in our affective structures of memory and love. The works by Mariana Rocha, Eduardo Araújo Silva/DUDX and Igi Lola Ayedun look at the liquidity of the ecosystem through abstract representations of deep water, between sea, waterfall, mangrove, body and placenta. In addition, looking at the territories that subsidize everything, the exhibition hosts works by Kelton Campos Fausto and Iagor Peres, which show the black and brown skin smeared on earth.
The exhibition also embraces popular and contemporary manifestations where similar cultural traditions spread among distant peoples through the figurative representations of Larissa de Souza and Rafaela Kennedy, between Afro-diasporic gender and class identities revised under the gaze of happiness as an act of revolution.
WATER MARKS: WE MUST REMEMBER as a title represents an exercise in analogy to hope on the high seas, among all the routes that shaped Afro-diasporic identities and that, today, provoke a new calibre of organization in global societies.
Images:
Larissa de Souza, "A mulher que vê a lua de dia é a mais bela", (2021). Acrylic and golden leafs on linen, 120 × 100 × 4 cm.
Igi Lola Ayedun, "Caminhos para cegueira, última memória", (2021). Ink, acrylic and gouache on pure silk, 137 × 103 cm.
