Rivane Neuenschwander Tropics: Damned, Orgasmic and Devoted

Among the most influential Brazilian artists working today, Rivane Neuenschwander’s practice explores the roles of chance, order, control, collaboration, and emotion through a wide range of perspectives and materials. Employing external elements — such as social interaction and natural processes — the artist has developed a unique language to produce complex ideas and experiences. Drawing specifically upon the legacy of Brazilian conceptualism, folk literature, and popular culture, Neuenschwander’s work examines language, nature, geography, and time as they relate to history, fear, and anguish. Widely known for her use of an ephemeral lexicon, the artist probes social interactions through an acute political lens.

Central to this exhibition is the artist’s ongoing research of psychological spectrums and how fear, sexuality and violence influence our culture and politics. While the works on view stem from the current political landscape in Brazil, their impetus traces universal truths and global political trends.

For Neuenschwander, the question of fear is fundamental to mapping the myriad of ways in which authoritarian governments come to power, and the necropolitics they employ in order to maintain it. Investigating how emotions can be weaponized as tools of control and contamination, Tropics: Damned, Orgasmic and Devoted unveils the mechanisms used to perpetuate political dominance.

The expansive installation Allegory of Fear occupies the entire first floor of the gallery. Made in collaboration with architect Álvaro Razuk and musicians Arto Lindsay and Thiago Nassif, a large-scale construction of wood, mirrors, paint, fabric, overhead projectors, shadows, and sounds transform the gallery space into a labyrinth of playful perceptions, colors, and silhouettes. To create Allegory of Fear, Neuenschwander worked with children in an art-making workshop setting, discussing and collecting their impressions of fear. The artist asked the participants to express their fears on paper, subsequently producing images of cockroaches, monsters, snakes and ghosts. These images and words were then recreated by Neuenschwander on colored transparencies, creating the visual and conceptual underpinning of the work.

In Allegory of Fear, visitors are encouraged to meander through the wooden structure and interact with the work. By changing the transparencies on the overhead projectors, the public can create new silhouettes and color patterns on the walls and ceilings, allowing abstract emotions to permeate the space. Together with giant silhouettes painted on the walls, a juxtaposition of ideas and graphics create a sense of illusion, reality, and distortion. The sound components of the work are hidden throughout the room, echoing in unpredictable ways and intensifying the overarching element of angst.

Allegory of Fear speaks to different faculties of our collective and individual consciousness. It is an invitation to feel, and at the same time to reflect on feeling as an ideological construct. In actively participating—and physically altering the space around them—visitors may confront their fears, identify them, or question their roots and motivations.

This will be the third iteration of this major work. Previous versions were presented at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden (2019), and NC-Arte Bogotá (2018).

On the gallery’s second floor, Tropics: Damned, Orgasmic and Devoted, is a series of large-scale tapestries and corresponding paintings. Inspired by Brazilian poet Hilda Hilst’s Poemas Malditos, Gozosos e Devotos from 1984, this body of work threads together the core themes explored throughout the show.

Based on the aesthetic of Japanese erotic woodcuts from the 17th century, this new body of work is also inspired by Cordel Literature–folk literature popular in the Brazilian Northeast region. Scenes of extreme violence are depicted in vivid colors and soft curving forms. Human body parts and anthropomorphic creatures intertwine in a brutal tug and pull, where phalluses, vulvas, and other bodily features are wrestling in muddy puddles of blood. Influenced by the notion of sexual aggression as a founding practice in Brazil’s identity politics, the human scale of the tapestries emphasizes the sheer terror of their content.