Brazilian Dictatorship-Era Conceptual Art Gains Urgency Amid Political Climate at São Paulo Gallery

Galeria Superfície in São Paulo presented 'New Media and Conceptualism in the 1970s' from April 2 to May 25, 2019, featuring works created during Brazil's brutal military dictatorship. Sonia Andrade's 1975 video shows her violently consuming feijoada and spraying Guarana Antarctica on her head, while a 1977 piece depicts aggressive teeth brushing. Artur Barrio's 1974 wall sculpture garrotes bread with wire, and Regina Silveira's 'Enigma' series from 1981/1999 splices objects with tool silhouettes. The exhibition opened one week after Brazil's administration ordered military commemoration of the 1964 coup that began the autocratic regime. Many works were made during the 'years of lead' from 1968, when state-sponsored torture, execution, and censorship intensified. The upper gallery displays mail art projects from the early 1970s onward, including 'Envelope On/Off' (1974) with nine A5 contributions containing sly political messages. Angelo de Aquino's 1973-1984 identity form project received responses from American poet Dick Higgins, Brazilian Ivens Machado, Icelandic Einar Gudmundsson, and Christo. Conceptualism's opacity provided safety for artists under dictatorship, with mail art building global solidarity networks despite not being overtly political. The show features Lotus Lobo's 1972 lithograph 'Bienal de Tóquio' referencing indigenous resistance and Iole de Freitas's photographic diptych 'Introvert/Penetrate' showing a woman with a knife in her neck.