9th Bienal do Mercosul


Weather Permitting / Se o clima for favorável / Si el tiempo lo permite


13 September–10 November 2013

Porto Alegre, Brazil

Artistic Director and Chief Curator: Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy

As much as weather can be a public concern (ecological and economical), it is also material substance (psychological and physical). Thus, such a common phrase is an invitation to ponder when and how, by whom and why, certain artworks and ideas have or lack physical or cultural visibility at a given moment in time. At the start of its planning, the curatorial promises put forth were to identify, propose, and repurpose changing belief systems and appraisals of experimentation and innovation, to encounter natural resources and material cultural in a new light, and to speculate on the grounds that have marked distinctions between discovery and invention. Its intent was, is, to raise ontological and technological questions through artistic practice, object making and nodes of experience.

This has given shape to the three main public initiatives of this Bienal: Portals, Forecasts and Monotypes, a multi-venue exhibition of contemporary art; Island Sessions, a discussion and publication series; and Cloud Formations, an arts pedagogy program. In the exhibition are historic and new works, as well as several historic artworks created after collaborative art commissions, including new projects ensuing from Imagination Machines, developed in partnership with artists, companies, research centers and communities in Brazil. In singular and interrelated ways, these initiatives conceptually focus on the interaction between nature and culture, and the ways in which visual artists address unknown, unpredictable and seemingly uncontrollable phenomenon. They consider the natural causes and effects that propel human travel and social displacement, technological advancement and world development, vertical expansions in space and transversal explorations through time.

Curatorial Team
Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy is the artistic director and chief curator of the 9th Bienal do Mercosul | Porto Alegre. The curatorial team includes Mônica Hoff, ground curator and head of Cloud Formations; Raimundas Malašauskas, time curator; Bernardo de Souza, space curator; and curatorial cloud fellows Sarah Demeuse, Daniela Pérez, Júlia Rebouças, and Dominic Willsdon. Luiza Proença is the editorial coordinator.

Image: “Weather Permitting / Se o clima for favorável / Si el tiempo lo permite.” Photo: Júlia Rebouças. Courtesy Bienal do Mercosul