Vincent Meessen shows a site-specific installation version of Juste un Mouvement at the 34th Bienal de São Paulo
04/09 – 05/12/2021
Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, Parque Ibirapuera, portão 3, Vila Mariana
São Paulo, Brazil
Free entrance
This installation benefits from the kind support of Fédération Wallonie Bruxelles, WBI and Flanders State of the Art
Artist and filmmaker Vincent Meessen (1971, Baltimore, USA) combines criticism of colonial models used to write history with an affective attention to certain disruptive actions of the past. While investigating political movements, projects, artworks, and essays that confronted the political and social contradictions of their times, Meessen develops installations, publications, and films that challenge viewers to question the forms of silencing faced by such movements, and about the factors that keep them pertinent, even today.
In a number of his works, the objects of interest are linked to the work of Situationist International, the revolutionary movement (active between 1957 and 1972), which gave rise to an integral criticism of society. Aware that most of the history of that movement concentrates on its supposed French focus, captained by the figure and writings of Guy Debord, Meessen investigates gaps in that history, such as the existence of situationist direct influence on the African continent and in the Caribbean. It was while researching this area that the artist came across a photograph picturing the young, militant, Senegalese philosopher Omar Blondin Diop reading the last edition of the magazine Internationale Situationniste. This document became the catalyst for the film Juste un Mouvement [Just a Movement], which will be shown at the 34th Bienal, inside the spiral-shaped installation The Sun Will Always Rise.
Omar Blondin Diop’s entered the cinema history with his appearance in the film La Chinoise (1967), by Jean Luc-Godard, where he played himself teaching a class on Marxism and Maoism to a group of young people, who have gathered in an apartment to prepare a transition from student movement into armed action. Meessen appropriates Omar’s participation as an opportunity to revisit a method used by Godard at the time – making a film as a process of registering the making of another film –, moving it to present-day Dakar, Senegal. In this way, he both pays tribute to and criticizes Godard’s 1967 film, inverting its geographical and political focus. In Juste un Mouvement, history and cinema are experienced as one continuous polyphonic movement, replete with spiral overlaps, throughout which a narrative is woven by Omar’s friends and family, reunited today to remember his ideas and attitudes, and to demand the truth about his political imprisonment and death during the government of Léopold Sédar Senghor (poet, advocate of the Négritude movement and the first president of Senegal after the Independence, who ruled a single-party regime from 1960 to 1981).
The 34th Bienal de São Paulo – Faz escuro mas eu canto – lays claim to the right to complexity and opacity, both in expressions of art and culture as well as in the identities of individuals and social groups. The fulcrum of the project – at which multiple situations of encounter are articulated between art and the public – will be the group show that will occupy the Bienal Pavilion. Curated by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, Paulo Miyada, Carla Zaccagnini, Francesco Stocchi and Ruth Estévez, the show recognizes the urgency of problems that defy life in today’s world, while claiming the need for art as a field of encounter, resistance, rupture and transformation.
While this edition officially started in February 2020, it has since been unfolding in space and time with both physical and online programming. This year’s digital programme (Feb – April, 2021) kicked off with online talks, courses, and studio visits with the participating artists. The physical exhibition Faz Escuro Mas Eu Canto (Though It’s Dark, Still I Sing) will open on September 4th, 2021 at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in São Paulo.
Participating artists:
Abel Rodríguez
Adrián Balseca
Alfredo Jaar
Alice Shintani
Ana Adamović
Anna-Bella Papp
Antonio Dias
Beatriz Santiago Munõz
Carmela Gross
Carolina Maria de Jesus
Clara Ianni
Daniel de Paula
Deana Lawson
Dirk Braeckman
Edurne Rubio
Eleonora Fabião
Eleonore Koch
Emerson Uýra
Frida Orupabo
Gala Porras-Kim
Giorgio Morandi
Grace Passô
Gustavo Caboco
Hélio Oiticica
Jacqueline Nova
Jaider Esbell
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
Joan Jonas
Jota Mombaça
Juraci Dórea
Koki Tanaka
Lasar Segall
León Ferrari
Luisa Cunha
Lydia Ourahmane
Lygia Pape
Manthia Diawara
Marinella Senatore
Melvin Moti
Musa Michelle Mattiuzzi
Naomi Rincón Gallardo
Neo Muyanga
Nina Beier
Noa Eshkol
Paulo Nazareth
Philipp Fleischmann
Regina Silveira
Sebastián Calfuqueo Aliste
Sung Tieu
Tony Cokes
Trajal Harrell
Vincent Meessen
Ximena Garrido-Lecca
Yuko Mohri
Zózimo Bulbul
Zina Saro-Wiwa
Curatorial team
Chief curator: Jacopo Crivelli Visconti
Adjunct curator: Paulo Miyada
Guest curators: Carla Zaccagnini, Francesco Stocchi and Ruth Estévez
Read more on the website of the Bienal de São Paulo
