Travel Tip: Art and Archaeology in Brazil
Parque Industrial

To mark the 30th Bienal de São Paulo, Galeria Luisa Strina has invited Julieta González to curate an exhibition.

The exhibition takes its name and thematic approach from Parque Industrial, Patricia Galvão's 1933 proletarian novel, but is equally constructed as a "theater of objects" referencing Georges Perec's structural use of the object in his novel Les Choses, une histoire dês années soixante (1965), and Jean-Luc Godard and Jean Pierre Gorin's recourse to Brechtian strategies in the film Tout Va Bien (1972). The exhibition examines how contemporary artists address the labour relations inscribed in the commodity, the intricate relations between production and consumption that are embedded in it, and the "commodity status" of art.

Borrowing Brechtian stage strategies, such as defamiliarization, repetition and a recourse to the uncanny, the exhibition is structured like a play in five acts; each one, except the first, takes the title of some of the chapters in Galvão's novel, and functions as an autonomous smaller exhibition. These sections address a range of subjects: commodification, production, alienation and de-alienation, consumption, and education.

The exhibition includes works by the following artists: Yael Bartana, Thomas Bayrle, Alexandre da Cunha, Edgard de Souza, Cao Fei, Silvie Fleury, Carlos Garaicoa, Liam Gillick, Terence Gower, Magdalena Jitrik, Joaquim Jordà, Jac Leirner, Renata Lucas, Marepe, Allan McCollum, Josephine Meckseper, Cildo Meireles, Antoni Muntadas, Felipe Mujica, Nicolás París, Mai-Thu Perret, Tadej Pogacar, Pedro Reyes, Beatriz Santiago, Andreas Siekmann and Alice Creischer, Gabriel Sierra, and Mladen Stilinovic.

About the curator     
           
Julieta González is Senior Curator at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City and Adjunct Curator at The Bronx Museum of the Arts New York. She was associate curator of Latin American Art at Tate Modern, London (2008–2011). González has curated exhibitions, edited artist books and written essays for international publications and catalogues.