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| INVITATION The Work of the Spirit (Parade) A solo exhibition by Tamar Guimarães PREVIEW: FRIDAY 27 MAY, 6.30 - 9PM | EXHIBITION CONTINUES UNTIL 17 JULY |
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| Image: Tamar Guimarães, Canoas (2010). Video still. For her first solo exhibition in the UK, Tamar Guimarães presents a newly commissioned short film alongside two existing works: Canoas (2010) and A Man Called Love (2008). Guimarães' research-based practice deals with the staging of history. Gathering and manipulating archival images and texts, the artist investigates the relationship between labour, culture and privilege. Her speculative narratives are rooted in competing instances of modernity, from the theatres of 1910s London to the modernist architecture of 1950s Brazil. Often foregrounding social and class structures, they call into question the role of the left. The slide presentation and accompanying publication A Man Called Love give an account of Francisco Candido Xavier (1910 - 2002), a Brazilian psychic medium who wrote over 400 books, dictated to him by the dead. Tracing an unusual relationship between redemption and forms of resistance, the work describes how Xavier's version of Spiritism aligned all too neatly with the conservative views of the ruling class during the years of dictatorship in Brazil from 1964 to 1985. The video Canoas centres upon a cocktail party at Oscar Niemeyer's Casa das Canoas; a masterpiece of Brazilian modernist architecture bordered by tropical jungle. In these seductive surroundings, we overhear snippets of guests' conversations, which range from discussions about the quality of the champagne to the questioning of Gilberto Freyre's observation that “Brazil has an eroticism that transcends race and class”. Guimarães' new commission documents the teaching of a choreographed dance from Léonide Massine's modernist ballet Parade (1917), looking at the overlap of the symbolic and economic value of works of art. |
| RELATED EVENTS |
| FRIDAY 24 JUNE, 7PM LAST FRIDAYS: CURATOR'S TOUR Gasworks' Exhibitions Curator Robert Leckie leads an informal tour of the exhibition, offering an insight into Tamar Guimarães’ research topics and the themes behind her film works. |
| WEDNESDAY 29 JUNE, 7 - 9PM IN CONVERSATION: LARS BANG LARSEN AND TAMAR GUIMARAES Tamar Guimarães discusses her artistic practice and its broader contexts with art historian and curator Lars Bang Larsen. |
| LAST FRIDAY IN SOUTH LONDON |
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