Mrinalini Mukherjee Hall
The large exhibition hall, the Mrinalini Mukherjee Hall, can be reached via the stairs directly behind the ticket counter, or, for barrier-free access, by taking the lift in the foyer down one floor. This way, you can reach the exhibition hall through the lower foyer. Once inside the hall, you will see works by various artists, a selection of which we would like to introduce to you.
Gervane de Paula
It may seem strange to encounter an artwork bearing phrases such as ‘Damn Art’, ‘Art Drug’, or ‘Art Here I Kill’. What leads a work of art to rebel against its own nature? This provocation runs through the work of Gervane de Paula, an artist born in Cuiabá whose practice encompasses sculptures, paintings, and objects that engage with the Cerrado biome and Brazil’s Central-West region. His works combine vibrant colours and sunlit imagery with denunciations of the violence caused by land expropriation and the dynamics of the art market. Catastrophe coexists with celebration, while humour accompanies critique. Many of his works feature ironic phrases that challenge us to listen to what these objects have to say. ‘Life is good because it ends’, for example, offers a stark yet poetic reflection on existence. Gervane describes himself as an object artist. For more than forty years, his practice has continually reinvented itself, prompting art to question its own assumptions. His creations frequently give form to local wildlife—jaguars, jabirus, as well as fantastical beings—that seem to carry the secrets of the natural world while simultaneously bearing witness to its destruction. Here the artist brings together paintings, sculptures, and objects that combine social critique, religiosity, humour, and elements of everyday life in the state of Mato Grosso. Working with materials such as wood, papier-mâché, metal, fabric, and collage, he creates compositions of vivid colours and direct forms, filling the exhibition space with hybrid figures, symbolic animals, and incisive messages. Three works are on view: Arte aqui é mártir [Here Art Is a Martyr] from 2017, Bacia hidrográfica [Watershed] from 2016, and a work consisting of two sculptures titled Pata [Paw] from 2014. The first is an oil painting and collage on wood shaped like the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, the artist’s birthplace. Against a black background, trees surround the body of a dead artist whose blood flows through the forest like a river, while he holds a paintbrush stained with the same blood-red paint and a canvas or sheet of paper bearing an inscription. Watershed plays on the Portuguese term bacia hidrográfica, literally, hydrographic bowl, which refers both to a drainage basin and, literally, to a basin or bowl. The work is painted on an actual basin whose interior depicts an ocean, transforming the object into something resembling a bowl from which animals drink water. The two Paw sculptures reproduce jaguar paws, an animal emblematic of the Cerrado. Made from synthetic leather and faux fur, they contrast the softness of their materials with the animal’s ferocity, while also alluding to furry aesthetics through their exaggerated, cartoon-like gestures. Heat, animals, the intertwined relationships of extraction and symbiosis between humans and nature, and, by extension, the artist’s own relationship with the art market are recurring themes throughout Gervane’s work, as demonstrated by this selection of emblematic pieces from his career.
Lidia Lisbôa
In Tetas que deram de mamar ao mundo [Teats that Fed the World] Lidia Lisbôa presents three textile sculptures crocheted from wide strips of fabric braided by hand. Each piece has its own distinct form, colour, and scale, ranging from rounded to elongated volumes that evoke enlarged breasts and nipples. The sculptures unfold across a contrasting colour palette, while their surfaces alternate between densely crocheted, compact textures and looser areas from which individual strips of fabric emerge, creating tactile forms reminiscent of body hair, roots, or organic extensions. The works emerge through the repetitive and patient practice of crocheting, a practice traditionally passed down from generation to generation, primarily among women. This transmission carries memory with it and the formation of identity. This intergenerational process of learning has also shaped our understanding of what it means to be human, of community and of shared knowledge. It also belongs to the realm of oraliterature a concept advocated by the Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo, in which oral traditions and lived experiences become forms of knowledge and cultural transmission. Within the exhibition space, the sculptures appear as monuments to care and nourishment, but also as monuments to the collective strength inherent in craftwork. As we approach them, the subtle differences between the individual sculptures become visible. It is as though each possessed an energy of its own while also forming part of a shared gesture of protecting and being held in safety. These works belong to a series that Lisbôa has been developing for the past ten years. As Luiza Marcolino writes in the catalogue of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, ‘By weaving stories instead of narrating them linearly, she reverberates common anxieties, fears, and desires, often hidden or concealed by society. In this way, she makes sewing a choice, a strategy for survival, for recovering herself, and for building memories.’
María Magdalena Campos-Pons
For over forty years, multidisciplinary artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons has created works rooted in autobiographical narratives that engage with her Cuban ancestry, shaped by Hispanic, Chinese, and African heritages. This intersectionality becomes a creative force through which she represents multiple experiences and realities. As Marisa Del Toro writes in the catalogue of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, at the heart of Campos-Pons’ artistic practice is an attempt ‘to speak the unspeakable, to bear witness, and to face the truth’. Macuto, from 2025, occupies a space measuring approximately 12 by 12 metres and is organized around a large circular structure seven metres in diameter, formed by two concentric rings of translucent fabric printed with floral patterns and suspended from circular steel frames. The overlapping layers of fabric create shifting effects of transparency and colour that transform the viewer’s perception as they move through the space. At the centre of the installation stands a laser-cut steel sculpture painted in warm shades of red, orange, and yellow, measuring 140 centimetres high by 35 centimetres wide. Inspired by the form of a tropical heliconia flower, the sculpture serves as the ritual axis of the work, around which visitors are invited to sit and experience the immersive environment created by the installation. The installation explores the relationship between materiality and spirituality, ancestral knowledge, the nature of time, and the transformative potential of collective healing practices. Conceived as a multisensory experience—engaging smell, sound, touch, taste, and performance—it dissolves the boundaries between past, present, and future. Campos-Pons transforms the exhibition space into a portal of spiritual communion, where painting, sculpture, sound, and scent intertwine to create a place of healing, sharing, and contemplation. As Del Toro further observes, ‘Campos-Pons is an artist who channels the energy of the Black body, experiences, and realities as a form of visual communication to past and present information but, above all, as an homage to future times and possibilities for human existence.’
Julianknxx
Julianknxx’s work refuses to remain fixed. It moves across geographies, languages, and gestures, constructing an archive in motion in which each voice resonates as part of a larger chorus. To think about his practice is to engage directly with the cultural roots of West Africa, particularly Sierra Leone, where the artist was born. Through films, installations, and performances, Julianknxx does not seek a singular testimony but rather a fabric of memories and presences that eludes colonial narratives. His gaze does not collect, it listens. The motif of displacement and movement is a constant presence throughout his work. The sea, port cities, and bodies waiting or in transit as traces of a past that has never ceased to move. The ocean is not merely a backdrop but a protagonist: a liquid archive that holds both trauma and possibility. It erases traces and yet carries them forward. In his work, Europe does not appear as a clearly defined place, but as an unstable landscape in which Black bodies continually redefine what it means to belong somewhere The exhibition presents the 2025 video what colours can we dream in this night filled with salt? Through movement, dance, and gesture, the work brings the body into direct relationship with the sea and salt. At the beginning a title card appears with words written in English: I am listening for the next song that remembers how to shake salt out of my wings – a way the body gives back built up frequencies Throughout the video, the artist narrates in English. Later, a group of women appears gathered in a room, singing in their own language. Their collective song carries the viewer beyond the surface of the images, inviting us to imagine the colours evoked by the question that gives the work its title. Julianknxx is as interested in the history of the world as he is in the everyday histories of the people who inhabit it, an interest that forms the backdrop of his artistic practice. Rooted in the African oral tradition, his work asks what it means to belong to a place when places are always shaped by other histories. Writing poetry is a fundamental part of his creative process, a tool that not only underpins his work but also gives it form as he articulates his experiences and observes the realities of the world, transforming fragments of memory into new forms of resistance. His practice challenges the hierarchies of the western archive, turning listening into a radical method and fragmentation into form. Julianknxx proposes a radical practice of listening, in which past and present rub against one another, and history emerges not as a static account but as something living, continually remade with every song. His images and sounds remind us that our histories consist not only of inherited colonial narratives, but also of the songs we continue to sing, even when no one seems to be listening.
Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos
A casa de Bené is a large-scale installation produced in 2025 by Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos. Drawing on a collection of objects salvaged from the pau a pique (wattle-and-daub) house built by her great-grandfather, Benedito Cândido, and later demolished, Raylander creates a work that seeks to acknowledge his artistic practice, its influence on her political and poetic formation, and the possibility of reconstructing her family’s memory. The installation brings together two groups of artifacts that recur throughout the artist’s practice, presented here as though they were the foundations of Bené’s house. The first consists of textile column sculptures made from bundles of natural-fibre fabrics, wool knits, cotton shirts, and leather strips. Each sculpture measures approximately two meters in height by twenty centimetres in width and is built around a wooden structure, around which the different materials are wrapped, layered, and tied. This combination of textile fragments and bindings makes each column unique, as though it condensed different histories of use, the body, and material memory. Rising through the exhibition space, the columns form a totemic axis representing the children of Raylander’s great-grandfather.’ The second group consists of baskets made from bronze, glue, rubber hose, and jersey yarn, evoking the contrast between mining, the predominant activity in the artist’s hometown, and traditional basket-weaving practices. Around the opening, rubber hoses or thick jersey yarn form compact spirals, while loose strands sometimes extend toward the floor like umbilical cords. In the artist’s words, ‘the work knows things we don’t yet know ourselves’. Her practice emerges from a continuous research process developed over more than a decade, driven by her family’s history, particularly the trajectory of her great-grandfather. Among his many occupations, Benedito Cândido was also an artist, although his physical and intellectual labour was never recognized as such. His practice was rooted in basket weaving, the traditional craft of weaving bamboo or vines, and his greatest work was the construction of his own house, a project that unfolded over decades. Within this context, the house emerges as a site of struggle: a space that resists the expropriation of land through mining, the impacts of Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship, and the enduring legacies of enslavement. Although grounded in family history, Raylander’s research expands into the collective sphere, weaving together memory, territory, and history through Bené’s house and the historical events that shaped its existence.