On Thursday, February 20th at 20:00, Galit Eilat,Charles Esche and Oren Sagiv, curators of the 31st Bienal de São Paulo, will give a talk about the biennial. These three members of the Bienal curatorial team will talk about the development of the event, their working methods and look at a few of the planned projects.
The talk will start from the title of the Bienal: How to talk about things that don’t exist?The title is a poetic call to put the capability of art at the centre of the event.
The talk wil be conducted in English.
The verb in this title is planned to change as the Bienal unfolds, anticipating various actions that these things that don’t exist might require in order to be made present. We will first ‘talk about’things that don’t exist; later we will ‘live with’; ‘use’; ‘struggle against’ or ‘learn from’ things that don’t exist at different times and on different platforms. The key to thinking about things that don’t exist is to imagine that human understanding and decision-making are always partial and confined by limited expectations and beliefs. The things that do not exist are outside the commonly accepted frame of thinking and doing in any given society at any one time.
The 31st Bienal de São Paulo is curated by a team including Charles Esche, Galit Eilat, Nuria Enguita Mayo, Pablo Lafuente and Oren Sagiv, and associate curators Benjamin Seroussi and Luiza Proença.
Their conviction is that art can offer encounters with experiences and emotions that are not present in most analyses of human life. If individuals or groups within a society can recognize, through art, the things that they cannot acknowledge through other means, then they might be empowered to transform themselves in unpredictable ways. The hope of the 31st Bienal is that it can conjure these things into existence through artistic acts of will. Perhaps this is, in the end, the core function of art both historically and today.”
Charles Esche is director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands and Editorial Director of Afterall Publishing, London. Galit Eilat is independent curator, writer and,the founder and former director of the Israeli Center for Digital Art. Oren Sagiv is a professor of architecture at the Department of Architecture at the Bezalel Academy for Art and Design in Jerusalem and the chief designer of the Israel Museum.
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