Nottingham Contemporary

Tamar Guimarães works with time-based media, exploring residual and contemporary situations relating to art, architecture, and the institutions that present them. A documentary strand of her work has also delved into spectral architecture, ritual effervescence, voice hearing among Spiritists in central Brazil, states of rapture and their intersection with the nation-state.

This event is part of the series The Violence of Abstraction that brings together artistic practices dealing with colonial legacies and its interrelated ecological-climatic dynamics.

Canoas, 2010

16mm transferred to HD video, colour, sound, 13'

Canoas speaks directly to the social and class structures within the history of modernism. The work follows a fictive festive evening at the historic home Casa das Canoas, built in 1951, a touchstone of Brazilian architecture designed by Oscar Niemeyer to coexist seamlessly with the jungle around the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro. Filmed from various points of view from home’s servants to guests, the conversations illuminate the failure of modernism’s egalitarian precepts to level the differences between classes.

O Ensaio, 2018

HD video, colour, sound, 53'

A young director invited to propose a project for an exhibition attempts to stage a dramatic adaptation of ‘The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas’, a satirical 19th century novel by Machado de Assis, who, in 1880, foresaw the abolition of slavery that would take place eight years later but added, “here we will see the abolition of slavery but everything will remain the same.” Filmed in the Ibirapuera pavilion designed by Oscar Niemeyer, the Rehearsal is a film about short lived revolutionary actions, institutional memory, and about race and gender relations in Brazil.

Free. Booking recommended.

This event and our building are wheelchair accessible.