THE DISAGREEMENT: A THEATRE OF STATEMENTS

The shattered grounds of today's ideological debate conjure up a platform where distinct actors convey their respective monolithic discourses despite other concurring voices, as if a sovereign language were being used to depict unidimensional views of a multi-layered reality. Altogether, such narratives amount to nothing but a misleading hegemonic façade: social, political, and moral constructs informed by a colonial drive irrevocably oblivious to the existence of diverse symbolic and material backgrounds. This exhibition operates as an apologue of sorts, a conversation between artworks through myriad avenues of communication leading to otherwise unheard narratives—a “performative contradiction” aimed at deconstructing ontologies of power devised to establish a single discursive channel, one that prevents other social choreographies to take central stage at the public arena. Depending on the symbolic economies we face, the world appears differently, as an everchanging virtual realm, albeit the existence of a never to be dismissed, unifying political ground: the all-encompassing though uneven battlefield for control over language and historical narratives. "The Disagreement: a Theatre of Statements" brings together eleven contemporary Brazilian artists whose artistic practices emerge from the most diversified cultural backgrounds, thus pointing at a wide horizon of aesthetic and political preoccupations. The ensemble of artworks in this exhibition is not only revealing of Brazil’s both stratified and syncretic society but also of the ideological contradictions inherent to contemporary artistic practices on a transcultural perspective. Comprised of artworks created in different media— sculpture, installation, collage, video, painting, and performance—, this group show confronts narratives that reflect upon the impossibility of finding a common lexicon with which to debate inescapable timely issues such as class struggle, climate change, identity politics, heterogeneous belief systems, the legacy of symbolic and material culture, amongst other pressing matters.