Juliana Stein's Visual Poetry Exhibition in São Paulo Explores Autobiography and Memory

Juliana Stein presents her exhibition 'Não Está Claro até que a Noite Caia' at SIM Galeria in São Paulo, running until March 23, 2019. The show features short autobiographical texts printed on acrylic plates, marking a formal shift in her work. Stein abandons explicit subjects from earlier phases, such as bathers on beaches or dense landscape erasures, to engage with enigmatic, playful, and mysterious subject fictions. She describes her work as autobiographical, with an interval between things. For five years, Stein taught blind individuals, leading her to understand memory's role as forgetting rather than recollection. She sees the image as a record of something elusive. Curator Agnaldo Farias notes this new phase demonstrates an expanded understanding of photography, where phrases, words, or drawings relate directly or indirectly to photography and the act of seeing. Farias has followed Stein's work for nearly two decades and selected her piece 'Sim e Não' for the 29th Bienal de São Paulo in 2010. Her series 'Caverna' participated in 'Atlas do Império' at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 in the Italo-Latin American Institute Pavilion. A Gaúcha artist, Stein has worked with photography since the late 1990s in Curitiba, known for her social cuts of Brazilian reality. The exhibition questions art territories, spaces, and subjects, exploring fragmentation and change.