Curator: Luiz Gustavo Carvalho
Éder Santos is a video artist, moviemaker, screenwriter and graphic designer. He was one of Brazil’s multimedia art pioneers and is recognized worldwide for developing hybrid projects that bring together visual arts, cinema, theater, video art and the new media. His trajectory merges with that of the beginning of the audiovisual production in plastic arts in the 1980s, moving between the standards established by television and the experiments on amateur video art. He’s been awarded several times in Brazil and abroad, having participated in many editions of the World Wide Video Festival (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Videobrasil, and São Paulo’s Biennial. His works are a part of important collections in Brazilian as well as foreign institutions such as the Itaú Collection, the Museums of Modern Art in Bahia, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro, MOMA – The Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France), and the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (Miami, USA). Éder Santos has also built an awarded career as a movie and TV director and producer. He is the author of 15 short-films, 3 feature films, as well as TV series.
Vale Cultural Institute
One of the pioneers of Brazilian videoarte, Eder Santos is one of the most instigating contemporary Brazilian artists. Born in Belo Horizonte, State of Minas Gerais, he conquered the world with his art that today is a part of the permanent collections of some of the main museums around the world.
Vale Cultural Institute believes that culture is an instrumet of social transformation. In all its wealth, it has the power to transform people’s lives and cast an eye to a future of possibilities.
It is in these possibilities and the care for our multiple cultural identities that we come together with Eder’s work in order to hold the “retro/ativa” exhibition. The transversality of his work in the last 18 years. Through the selection of the video installations and video sculptures, the public of four Brazilian cities – Belo Horizonte, Vila Velha, Belém and São Luis – will also be able to take part in this unique encounter that challenges us in what we conventionally know.
Where there’s culture, there’s Vale.
Vale Cultural Institute
Project
Eder Santos constantly urges us to take away the lenses through which we see, on a daily basis, an ever-more-monochromatic world so that we can see what is unseen. Mixing different audiovisual languages and varied technologies, the thirteen video installations and video sculptures that make up the exhibition Retro/ativa blur the borders with the public.
The cold video technology is metamorphosed by the artist’s barroque-punk eyes by means of a virtuosic edition and image-manipulation work, subject to no linearity whatsoever. In these works, that gather a part of his production in the past 20 years, Eder Santos, one of the pioneers of multimedia art, worships the cinema of Humberto Mauro, Mário Peixoto and Glauber Rocha, evoking Guimarães Rosa’s landscapes, reinterpreting aspects of our state identiy, and questioning a docile society whose main motto comes down to: “work, consume, and die”.
By changing bird cages, sinks and tables into screens onto which dreamlike images are projected, Eder Santos finds the Benjaminian essence of play. In Eder Santos’s artistic universe, as he avoids mimeses, nothing is “done as if”; everything is “always done again”. The confusion created between the real and the unreal becomes a habit. At Memorial Minas Gerais Vale, the walls of the exhibition space are even transgressed by the artist in a desire to weave dialogues between the works and the architectural elements of the listed building. Refusing the accelerated rhythm imposed on us by the global era, Eder Santos’s work demands kairos time to unveil images collected from our daily lives – a cosmovision that, thanks to otherness, favors the articulation of many other worlds.
Luiz Gustavo Carvalho, curator.
Exhibited works
Janaúba
1993
Video Installation
Call Waiting
2005
Video Installation
Sloth / Encyclopaedia of Ignorance
2003
Video Installation
Jealousy / Encyclopaedia of Ignorance
2003
Videoinstalação
Humiliation / Encyclopaedia of Ignorance
2003
Videoinstalação
Contained Distortions
2010
Video Installation
São Sebastião / All Saints
2016
Video Installation
Santa Bárbara / All Saints
2016
Video Installation
Enlightened
2013
Video Installation
Dog Ville
2012
Video Installation
Barravento Novo / The New Turning Wind
(in collaboration with Bruce Yonemoto)
2017
Video on Fine Art
Barravento Novo / The New Turning Wind
(in collaboration with Bruce Yonemoto) 2017
Video Installation
Praça da Liberdade, 640,
esquina com Rua Gonçalves Dias
Belo Horizonte – Minas Gerais – Brasil
30140-010 – (31) 3308-4000
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