Curadoria em artes visuais: espaço de mediação, intersecção e embate com os processos coloniais no Brasil

Abstract

Since the 1980s, the field of curatorship in Brazil has been establishing itself as a strategic space for confronting the colonial logics that have historically organized the production, circulation, and legitimization of visual arts. Far from being limited to the selection and organization of works, curatorship asserts itself as a discursive, political, ethical, and pedagogical practice, capable of challenging the institutional and epistemological structures that uphold hegemonic narratives within the ecology of art. This thesis is based on the understanding that curatorship can operate as a critical tool of mediation and intersection, especially when committed to processes that make visible silenced voices, aesthetics, and histories. To support this argument, two exhibitions were analyzed: À Nordeste and Retomadas – the exhibition core of Brazilian Histories. The latter had its process gestated in Djá Guatá Porã: Indigenous Rio de Janeiro, being activated alongside an investigation of the ways contemporary curatorial practices have destabilized the boundaries between curatorship, criticism, historiography, and institutional action. By gathering catalogs, texts, videos, interviews, and public debates, this research investigates how these exhibitions propose new forms of symbolic mediation, as well as rethink the relationships between art, territory, memory, and power. To highlight the curatorial processes that reveal the distance between decoloniality and the discourses of art institutions in Brazil, the study chose to analyze how the formation of these institutions still reverberates the contamination of colonialism as a structural mode of operation.