Body Circumstances:
The Body Between the Public and Private Spaces
Curated by Arlindo Machado and Christine Mello

In this program we have presented a group of works by 10 Brazilian artists that represent the way media conditions the body in public and private spaces. Instead of trying to discern where one or the other situation is specifically found, we prefer to privilege the ambiguous experiences, the intermediate states and the contamination of one space by the other.

The exhibition consists of two programs that bring together experimental works in video that share very particular views about public and private spaces.

Program 1 - THE BODY FROM PUBLIC TO PRIVATE SPACES - gathers experiences about the conflicts induced by globalized urban spaces, where permanent vigilance predominates. The authors - Eder Santos, Lucas Bambozzi, Bruno de Carvalho, Rachel Rosalen and Leandro Hbl - present subjective views of what it means to live in the public space.

Program 2 - THE BODY FROM PRIVATE TO PUBLIC SPACES - is a selection of works by Lucila Meirelles, Inês Cardoso, Nina Galanternick, Neide Jallageas and Rafael França, wherein the encounters between the bodies of the artists and the electronic apparatus are enacted. In these videos, the bodies found in private spaces reveal themselves through the contact with the machine (camera and accessories). They are sensitive bodies that, due to technological mediation, gain a public existence, the same way as those that face the conflict with the urban landscape.

How can we understand a world in which the individual experiences take up—more and more—a collective character? Under what conditions does the sensorial experience take place today? Let us remember that "surveillance" and the "dream" were reoccurring themes in Surrealism in the 1920's. There is a piece by Rene Magritte that places together a blue sky in a clear day and a dark street with somber trees and lit street lamps at night. The sky, usually an ethereal and immaterial presence, imposes itself in this painting as a symbol of vigilance, a tangible and real object that can be seen. On the other hand, the space of the street shows itself as a place of reverie, in which dreams are lived, the subjective untouchable experience.

The videos in this exhibition follow the same rationale. It is not about regarding public and private spaces as themes for these works. On the contrary, it is about noticing how the artists and their work offer a new way of perceiving these spaces. As with Magritte's sky, public space can no longer be distinguished from other spaces—it can not be clearly located. It is the fitting context in contemporary society, the tangible element, the space of surveillance and of the so-called "real" world, while private space functions as the place reserved to the augmentation of the sensory—to the dream, to the imaginary. Yet both belong to the same reality and, as in Magritte's painting, they are like each other's folds, fields of reversibility and crossing, reciprocal inscriptions of the inside and of the outside.
The works selected here observe how the mechanisms of "surveillance" and "dreaming" have been updated for the present, in which the media and audio-visual apparatus take a central place in the repositioning of the subject. Therefore, the representation of our reality is understood, in these works, as a reciprocal conditioning of the bodies and of the technological means.

In that way, the artists here involve ethico-aesthetic strategies of sensory inter-mediation through machines, while seeking to re-think a new order for the subject in the age of information. Public body and private body show themselves, in contemporary times, interconnected as the sky and the street in Magritte's painting. It is about discovering what is private in the public body, and what is public in the private body. In this sense, this exhibition gives us the opportunity to visualize possible relationships between these phenomena and the conflicts faced in the fields of art/life and art/media.