São Paulo is home to one of the world’s oldest biennials, second only to Venice. Its first edition in 1951 has been credited with marking the end of Brazil’s apparent ‘cultural isolation’ from the West, and in many ways, the city’s vibrant art scene comes from this seminal moment. Today, there are over 50 galleries in the city; many of them, including Galeria Luisa Strina, Casa Triângulo, Central Galeria, Galeria Leme, Luciana Brito Galeria, and Simões de Assis, take part in fairs globally and boast international artist lists. What’s more, the likes of Mendes Wood DM, Nara Roesler, Galeria Kogan Amaro, and Galeria Jaqueline Martins also have outposts in the US and Europe. Yet when the biennial opens the doors of its Oscar Niemeyer-designed pavilion for the 34th edition on September 4, it will do so in a country once again undergoing a profound cultural and political shift.

‘The historical moment we are living in, both in Brazil and abroad, demands that we look at what is being produced beyond the Eurocentric heritage,’ says the curator of the exhibition, Jacopo Crivelli Visconti. As well as historical names such as Lygia Pape and Hélio Oiticica, Visconti’s show, ‘Though it's dark, still I sing’, will include numerous young Black and Indigenous artists from Brazil and further afield. ‘We have seen a few exhibitions on Indigenous artists from Brazil,’ Visconti continues, ‘but it is still not so common to see Indigenous production placed in direct contact with art from other perspectives.’ Yet mentalities are evolving. Earlier this year, the Pinacoteca, the city’s art museum, staged a survey exhibition of work by Indigenous artists, having started collecting work by Brazil’s first people in 2019. ‘What we are doing at the biennial is the next step,’ says Visconti. ‘We would not have got here without those shows.’

While the history of Brazilian art has traditionally been told hand in glove with that of the European avant-garde, today the art scene is paying better attention to those histories that were pushed aside. This is partly down to the global demand for better representation in the arts, inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement in the US; but there is also the local factor of far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s repeated dismissal of Indigenous rights, as well as his history of homophobic and misogynistic remarks.

Pollyana Quintella, an independent curator, says, ‘We are living in a cultural moment in Brazil in which demands for participation and diversity have entered strongly into institutions and galleries.’ Her group exhibition ‘A Máquina Lírica’, opening at Galeria Luisa Strina to coincide with the biennial, features young Indigenous, Black, trans, and queer artists. That their work is now being embraced by the market is, she says, ‘a symptom that the circuit is oxygenating and challenging itself.’

New institutional arrangements are emerging between Brazilian galleries and artists, with the latter often demanding greater autonomy – a tacit acknowledgement of the history of colonial exploitation. Makuxi artist Jaider Esbell will participate in the biennial and recently had a show at Galeria Millan. He is not however represented by what is one of Brazil’s most storied dealers. ‘Jaider is not exclusively represented by us, nor by any gallery, because he assumes that he, as an Indigenous person, must present his own work, be his own institutional voice, and not be “represented”,’ explains a gallery spokesperson. Since 2013 Esbell has funded what he describes as a ‘laboratory’ in Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima state in the north of the country, in which he promotes art and projects by artists from a range of Indigenous ethnicities. His paintings, which depict motifs of Makuxi cosmology, are undoubtedly attractive, but he also sees them as a form of pedagogical activism. 

A similar sentiment underpins the work of Claudia Andujar, a Swiss-born Brazilian photographer. Recent retrospectives at the Barbican in London and Fondation Cartier in Paris show the depth of her relationship with the Yanomami people. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Andujar lived for up to a year at a time with communities, drawing on her own Hungarian-Jewish family’s experience during the Holocaust, in her documentation of the genocide of the Indigenous over the past half-century in Brazil. Now aged 90, she uses her archive to continue that allyship. Jan Fjeld of Vermelho explains that before Andujar agreed to work with the gallery in 2003, 'She had one condition: one third of the profits had to go to Hutukara, an NGO promoting Indigenous rights, set up by Claudia’s long-time collaborator Davi Kopenawa Yanomami.’

In 1974 Andujar set up a drawing project, providing materials for the Yanomami to depict their vision of the cosmos. Back then the drawings were regarded as ‘anthropological’, now they are recognized as artworks. Among those that took part was Joseca Yanomami, whose practice has become highly regarded. His work is included in ‘Trees’, a Fondation Cartier show that has traveled to the Power Station of Art in Shanghai.

‘These voices hadn’t previously been given a space to exist in the art world, they didn’t have the backing of the critics, the aesthetics were at odds with what until recently was the norm,’ says Pedro Mendes, who co-founded Mendes Wood DM in 2010. ‘The year we opened, we organized a conference, with Coco Fusco and Sonia Gomes among the speakers, that concentrated on questions of race and art coming from outside the established axis,’ he continues. ‘People came to the gallery from all over São Paulo, including the suburbs. That was a turning point for us.’

A solo show by Gomes will be one of the five exhibitions Mendes Wood DM will stage in São Paulo in September, utilizing the three rooms in its gallery in the Jardins district, as well as a new hangar-like venue, which will replace its longstanding home, in downtown São Paulo. The artist says her textile sculptures relate to the Black body and ‘reclaiming’ space. This theme is picked up by another of the gallery’s artists showing in time for the biennial, Hariel Revignet, whose paintings marry depictions of Black figures with sculptural elements. She says her work is ‘decolonial and counter-colonial’ and her practice aims at establishing a space for ‘Afro-diaspora-Indigenous’ representation. According to Mendes: ‘There are questions being raised that haven’t been raised before, questions of anthropology, of history, and the body; these artists are actively revising the history of Brazil.’

A Black figurative painter such as Revignet finds a growing number of peers amongst the various gallery rostrums. Luisa Strina recently signed Panmela Castro (her work will be included in ‘A Máquina Lírica’), whose street murals and workshops in Rio de Janeiro are lauded for raising awareness of endemic domestic violence. Likewise, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel will stage a show in October of Márcia Falcão’s oil paintings showing women whose bristling strength is undercut by violence. Casa Triângulo now represent O Bastardo, whose work also taps into Rio’s graffiti scene; one recent portrait shows a young Black man with peroxide-bleached hair, a popular fashion for young men from the city’s favelas. Last year Igi Lola Ayedun set up HOA as a peer-run residency program; it has now become the first Black-run gallery in São Paulo, representing 14 artists and working with 45 more. ‘A few years back I started protesting the lack of inclusion of Black artists in galleries, organizing flash mobs, performances, speaking out. But I began to understand it was systematic. It was due to inertia that galleries weren’t showing Black artists, not through choice: those artists just weren’t coming up through the system. The only thing I could do to change that was to build my own gallery, a sustainable platform through which Black artists, many from very low economic backgrounds, could develop.’ 

Elian Almeida, best known for his paintings in which Black figures are depicted within pages of Vogue magazine, worked with HOA and has recently signed with Nara Roesler. He has said that he gravitates towards ‘relations that are dear to me: my color, my social status, and how it exists within society, the otherness… the idea of social performativity of the Black body, of state-driven violence, of decolonization, all of which are pertinent and urgent matters in contemporary Brazil, despite the decades of ongoing discussions.’ Ayedun says that HOA is essential for Black art because it is empathetic to this history: ‘I’m Black, I know what hurts, I know the difficulties of this society.’

A Gentil Carioca, founded by three artists, Márcio Botner, Ernesto Neto, and Laura Lima in Rio (Carioca is a nickname for the city’s residents), has opened their first outpost, in a 1940s former workers’ cottage in a quiet cobbled street in central São Paulo. (The lane is fast becoming an art destination: Projeto Vênus, dedicated to giving artist’s their first solo shows in the city, is there, and collector Pedro Barbosa will also open a space.) The inaugural show, ‘Bum-bum Paticumbum Prugurundum’, takes the carnaval blocos (or street parties) as its theme. ‘The gallery has always been connected to the street and its people,’ says Botner. In November Maxwell Alexandre will have a solo show in the new gallery. Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year 2020, he is the highest profile artist amongst the new generation in Brazil and his paintings depict everyday life in Rocinha, the Rio favela in which he was born and where his studio is based.

The championing of emerging artists from previously marginalized groups has, importantly, precipitated a redrafting of Brazilian art history. ‘Terra and Temperature’, a recent group show at Almeida e Dale Galeria de Arte demonstrated how figures such as Tarsila do Amaral, Mira Schendel, and Solange Pessoa were inspired by Arte Popular artists, whose autodidactic art was previously often dismissed as ‘naive’ or as being craft. Similarly, Simoes de Assis staged a pairing of 80-year-old Emanoel Araujo and Rubem Valentim, who died in 1991, which drew out the mixed reference points in the pair’s work relating to Candomblé, the Afrobrazilian religion, and geometric abstraction.

Artist and curator Jaime Lauriano is the co-author of the recent Enciclopédia negra, a rich compendium of 550 biographies of Black artists from the 17th century to the present, with many entries illustrated using portraits by the artists’ contemporaries. An eponymous exhibition of these works, 103 in total, is currently on show at the Pinacoteca. ‘We wanted to record the diverse, complex, and plural range of biographies of Black people throughout the history of Brazil,’ says Lauriano. ‘The visibility of Black artists' art has increased, and will do so more and more, but this is the result of the struggle that Black artists and curators have been through over the decades. What we see today in the exhibitions is the consolidation of a much larger project.’

‘We have to read backwards,’ Visconti agrees. ‘There will be a room in the biennial which features documentation of the Brâncuși works that weren’t allowed to enter the US in the 1920s. In the same room we have Amazoninos, a series by Lygia Pape based on Indigenous culture from the 1990s, with new work by Daiara Tukano, a contemporary artist of Tukano ethnicity. So starting from the high Modernism of Brâncuși, onto the rupture in Brazilian art history that the Neo-Concrete artists caused, and ending with today’s production. Daiara Tukano’s work is key, because it allows us to look back at those earlier works and realize that what we understood then was never the whole picture.’

Oliver Basciano is a journalist and critic based in São Paulo and London.

Captions for full-bleed images: 1a (desktop view): Maxwell Alexandre, Untitled (detail), 2021. Courtesy of the artist and A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. 1b (mobile view): Elian Almeida, Beatriz do Nascimento (Vogue Brasil) (detail), 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Nara Roesler, São Paulo, New York City, and Rio de Janeiro. 2a (desktop view): Jaider Esbel, Amamentação (detail), 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Millan, São Paulo. 2b (mobile view): Jaider Esbell, Nudez da alma (detail), 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Millan, São Paulo. 3. Hariel Revignet, Omawebèna (detail), 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, New York City, and Brussels. 5. Elian Almeida, Tia Maria do Jongo (Vogue Brasil) (detail), 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Nara Roesler, São Paulo, New York City, and Rio de Janeiro.