This is the first mid-career survey of works by Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander (b.1967, Belo Horizonte, Brazil), and will spotlight Neuenschwander’s unique contribution to the narrative of Brazilian Conceptualism, as well as the expanded field of her highly individualized practice.
Neuenschwander merges painting, photography, film, sculpture, immersive installations, and participatory actions. Her authorship is primary, but she also functions as an editor, collaborator, social organizer, and commissioning agent. Motifs that repeat with regularity include mapping, measuring, colonization, and categorization.
Works in the exhibition will include drawings exposed to equatorial rains as they morph into exquisite continental maps; an immersive installation that investigates paranoia in an age in which privacy is no longer an individual’s natural right; and videos highlighting the industriousness of ants and beetles while revealing their manic organizational systems that parallel those of the human world, among many others.
The show will span the third and fourth floor galleries and will be accompanied by a catalogue documenting the exhibition, along with essays by Richard Flood; Paulo Herkenhoff, Director, Museum of Fine Arts, Rio de Janeiro; Lars Bang Larsen, curator; Jasmil Raymond, Curator, DIA Art Foundation; and Rachel Thomas, Senior Curator and Director of Exhibitions at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition is organized by the New Museum in collaboration with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and is curated by Richard Flood, Chief Curator at the New Museum. After its New York debut at the New Museum the exhibition will travel to three other US venues, and will conclude at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Three installations in “A Day Like Any Other” will involve direct visitor participation: Neuenschwander’s I Wish Your Wish (2003); First Love (2010); and Walking in Circles (2000). I Wish Your Wish will be installed in the New Museum’s lobby gallery space (always open to the public free of charge). At the church of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil the faithful tie silk ribbons to their wrists and to the gates of the church, and, according to tradition, their wishes are granted when the ribbons wear away and fall off. For Neuenschwander’s installation I Wish Your Wish at the New Museum, hundreds of similar ribbons will be printed with visitors’ wishes from past projects, and will hang from the gallery walls. Visitors will be invited to remove a ribbon, tie it to their wrist, and replace it with a new wish written on slip of paper, continuing the project that keeps generating new ribbons and dreams. For another piece, First Love, a police sketch artist will sit with visitors and listen as those visitors describe the faces of their first loves; the sketch artist will then produce portraits of these “first loves” to adorn the walls of the gallery for the duration of the exhibition. In Walking in Circles (2000), small halos of adhesive applied to the gallery floor by the artist will pick up dirt from visitors’ shoes. The work will create a physical and temporal map of the exhibition’s traffic patterns.
http://www.newmuseum.org/rivane/
