From 18 May to 25 September 2023
Laura Lima: Balé Literal
A large mobile composition of hanging artefacts that moves around the space turning the Museum’s galleries into choreographed, walkable installations.
Laura Lima (Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1971) presented the original version of Balé Literal for the first and only time in 2019 at the crossroads outside A Gentil Carioca gallery in Rio de Janeiro. It was a large installation made of objects, machinery, paintings and various artefacts that danced around the public space in a choreographic movement, a peripatetic dance of the absurd orchestrated by a rudimentary mechanism and driven by the energy of various people under the artist’s direction. Extremely simple, yet greatly effective, the installation appeared as a kind of living organism composed of all sorts of objects and people endlessly moving around in a perfect image of our changing times.
Four years after that experience, Balé Literal will be recreated in the Museum galleries in a large, walkable installation functioning non-stop. The objects and paintings hanging from threads in this new device will be produced especially for the occasion, while also acting as reminders of other works by the artist. An unusually choreographed retrospective exhibition in continuous movement.
Born in the rural region of Minas Gerais, as a teenager Lima moved to Rio de Janeiro, where she studied Philosophy and Fine Art, and where she still lives. Interested in social relations and the way in which human behaviour alters our perception of the everyday, her work often incorporates living organisms, whether animal or human, and actions that are performed for long periods of time, such as Balé Literal.
Installed for the first time in a museum, Laura Lima’s spectacular Balé Literal will be accompanied by a publication including essays by philosophers, writers and other artists. The book will be published after the exhibition’s opening, so it can incorporate a photographic record of the work installed at MACBA.
Activation of the work:
- Monday, Thursday and Friday: 12:00 pm — 6:00 pm
- Wednesday: 3:30 pm — 6:00 pm
- Saturday: 12:00 pm — 7:00 pm
- Sunday: 11:30 am — 2:30 pm (except September 24: 12:00 pm — 7:00 pm)
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On September 13 and 25 there will be no activation.
She was the first Latin American recipient of the Bonnefanten Award for the Contemporary Arts (BACA) (Maastricht, the Netherlands) in 2014. Lima has put on solo exhibitions of her work in venues around the world such as Pinacoteca in Sao Paulo, Brazil; Fondazione Prada in Milan, Italy; the Pampulha Art Museum in Belo Horizonte, Brazil; the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, Argentina; MUAC, Mexico City, Mexico; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland; Casa Francia Brasil, Rio de Janeiro; Eva Klabin Foundation, Rio de Janeiro; Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden; Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, the Netherlands; SMK – National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen.
Lima’s work has been included in prestigious collective exhibitions, such as the 24th and 27th Sao Paulo Biennials; the 2nd and 3rd Mercosur Biennials in Porto Alegre, Brazil; the 11th Lyon Biennale in 2011; the Sharjah Biennial in 2019; the Busan Bienniale in South Korea; the Kaunas Biennial in Lithuania and the Stockholm Film Festival. Her works form part of the collections of the Inhotim Institute, the Bonniers Konsthall, the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, the Pampulha Art Museum, the Zabludowicz Collection, the Bonnefantenmuseum and more.
Laura Lima lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Together with Ernesto Neto and Marcio Botner, she is also a co-founder of A Gentil Carioca, a gallery directed by artists in Rio de Janeiro.
Constantly escaping from easy classification, Laura Lima’s “images” are not “performance, installation or cinema”, but try to articulate visually, in concrete reality, a personal glossary of concepts on which she has been working and reworking throughout her over 20-year career. Emblematic of this rigorous conceptual commitment is her best-known group of works Homem=carne / Mulher=carne (Man = meat / Woman = meat), in which humans and animals are used as mere matter (meat) that executes a precise set of instructions over and over again during the entire exhibition. Another part of Lima’s work is related to the notion of ornamental philosophy. Her oeuvre proposes new interpretations of accepted definitions and concepts, destabilising and subverting what is taken for granted.
Dyangani Ose was curator of the eighth Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, (GIBCA 2015) and Curator of International Art at Tate Modern (2011–14). Previously, she was Curator at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, and Artistic Director of Rencontres Picha – Lubumbashi Biennial (2013). Multidisciplinary in nature, her curatorial projects address the narration of history as a collective experience, the way in which public space is intervened, and the recovery of non-Western narratives and epistemologies. They include: A Story Within a Story… (2015); Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist (2013); Across the Board (2012–14); Carrie Mae Weems: Social Studies (2010); Arte Invisible (2009, 2010); and Olvida Quien Soy/Erase Me From Who I Am (2006).
As a specialist in contemporary African art, she has taught seminars and participated in conferences about contemporary African artistic production and culture. She is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University in New York. She holds a Diploma of Advanced Studies in the History and Theory of Architecture from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and a degree in History of Art from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Recently, she served as a visiting professor in Catalan Studies, an initiative organised by the Institut Ramón Llull and the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies (CEMS) at New York University.