In the year that completes two decades, the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON) is holding the long-awaited exhibition "Indigenous Stools of Brazil". The opening will be on June 23, in Room 6. The curators are Marisa Moreira Salles and Tomas Alvim.
The show brings together more than 200 stools belonging to the BEĨ Collection from 40 Amazonian ethnic groups. Divided into two parts, the first dedicates to the extensive production of the Xingu Indigenous Land, located in Mato Grosso. The second part brings together other indigenous peoples from various parts of the Amazon, located in Acre, Pará, Tocantins, Maranhão, Roraima, Amapá, and Amazonas. The exhibition also includes a stool of an ethnic group from Santa Catarina and six large images by photographer Rafael Costa in the Xingu Indigenous Territory (TIX).
"Indigenous art, Asian and African art, has always inspired artists. More and more open and plural, the Oscar Niemeyer Museum puts diverse cultures side by side that, while they converse, demonstrate their uniqueness and allow us an interesting vision of the world," says the director-president of MON, Juliana Vosnika.
She comments that, by holding the "Indigenous Stools of Brazil" exhibition, the MON fulfills one of the leading roles of a museum: establishing dialogues between cultures and territories through art.
"If we think of the original peoples as the first Brazilian designers, we can look further into the immense contribution of the indigenous people in various aspects of culture," says Juliana.
For the General Superintendent of Culture, Luciana Casagrande Pereira, with this exhibition, the Museum adds another layer to its plural approach to the arts. "Establishing a bridge with native peoples through symbolic objects of their cultures is a gift to the great public that visits the MON, this significant cultural institution of Paraná," she says.
The curators explain that the BEĨ Collection was born from an aesthetic dazzlement with the unmistakable beauty of the Brazilian indigenous stools' forms, colors, graphics, and textures. "Its trajectory starts from enchantment to a deeper understanding of their meanings," says Marisa Moreira Salles. "By approaching the art of native peoples with this grandiose exhibition, MON shows its vanguardism," comments Tomas Alvim.
Dialogue among art collections
The MON's director-president tells about an incredible coincidence with the arrival of Poty Lazzarotto's collection, officially incorporated into the Museum's collection on March 29, 2022 (Curitiba's birthday and Poty's birthday). Among thousands of works, there are drawings of Indian stools made by Poty when he spent a season in the Xingu in the 1960s.
The drawings will be available to visitors, simultaneously with the "Indigenous Stools of Brazil" exhibition, in a small section of the show, in the first-floor hall of the Museum, near the visitors' exit. "Such affinity proves the permeability of art," says Juliana.
Service: “Indigenous Stools of Brazil” From 23 June
The BEĨ Collection was born from an aesthetic fascination, in a casual contact with the pieces. The interest, at that point, was the stools themselves, the unmistakable beauty of their shapes, colors, graphics and textures. Functionality combined with elegance revealed a clear proximity of the stools to contemporary design, at the same time that they carried the history and culture of the people who made them. The immersion in this universe showed us how much the artistic manifestations of urban and modern Brazil owe to the art of the native peoples. It became clear that the collection was not a grouping of exotic objects, but a collection of works that were related to Brazilian identity.
The publication of the book “Indigenous Stools of Brazil”, in 2015, marks a turning point in the BEĨ Collection. The long editing process that preceded the release was also a period of conceptual transformation. If the initial objective of the book was to document the collection, the complexity of the pieces ended up imposing a series of questions that were difficult to answer, for the stools blur the boundaries between art and artifact, the sacred object and the commodity, tradition and experimentation. Although they carry symbolic and ritual weight, they also respond to the demand of buyers and collectors. They are models made with ancient techniques, passed down from generation to generation, but they are also unique works, in which it is possible to recognize not only the culture they come from, but also the unique style of the one who carved them – the author's mark, which is not to be confused with the group. By publishing the name of these creators – which, in some cases, required months of research – the book recognized and legitimized them as artists.
Since the book's release, the stools have gained increasing visibility outside the villages and the universe of anthropological research. Pieces from the collection were exhibited in different exhibitions, inside and outside Brazil, with the presence of indigenous artists.
This movement of exposure to the outside world revealed, in a more open way, the modus vivendi of those who manufactured the stools. As indigenous artists conquered a voice and space in this new context, the potency and vulnerability of their culture of origin became wide open.
Thus, in a third moment, the BEĨ Collection once again turned the attention to the collectivity: it was no longer about thinking of stools as artifacts created by homogeneous indigenous ethnicities, but to understand that each artist, in their uniqueness, is a member of a community historically marked by exclusion, violence and an isolation that has become even more dramatic with the covid-19 pandemic.
The preservation of traditional and primeval production patterns reveals the extreme aesthetic sophistication of the civilizations that flourished in pre-colonial Brazil. In this way, from this single object, the stool, it is possible to reconstruct all the variety, diversity and refinement of Brazilian ancestral cultures, which remain alive despite the repeated aggressions to which they have been subjected.
The dynamics of the BEĨ Collection work in a two-way relationship: on one hand, buying, preserving, cataloging and exhibiting the stools results in learning in several spheres – cultural, artistic, environmental, personal; on the other hand, this movement offers an opportunity for indigenous communities to conquer space, recognition and autonomy.
This exhibition is yet another step on this path of maturity, not only for the collection itself, but also above all for the collection's relationship with indigenous villages. It is the result of a trajectory that goes from the initial enchantment by traditional art to a deeper understanding of its meanings, in addition to the awareness that these peoples must be seen and heard, understood in their singularities and respected in their decisions.
An exhibition at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, a great master of Brazilian architecture, is symbolic for the dimension of the space offered to the collection, but mainly because the architect has always had a close relationship with the aesthetics of the indigenous peoples of Brazil. According to Ciro Pirondi, president of the Oscar Niemeyer Foundation, “the design as an expression of a freedom present in the material culture of Brazilian indigenous people composes the memory of Oscar Niemeyer's domes or hollows. The wooden frames present in the structure of indigenous collective housing are replaced by steel and cement in the domes of the Brazilian Plateau, Ibirapuera and the ‘Eye’ of the Niemeyer Museum”.
We would like to express our gratitude to Kátia d’Avillez, who conceived the exhibition and since the beginning of the BEĨ Collection has worked for the promotion of indigenous design; to Marcelo Conrado, for his partnership in the reflections on indigenous art, and to the president of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, Juliana Vellozo Almeida Vosnika, and her team, who welcomed the exhibition generously and wisely, placing it alongside the collections of African and Asian art, creating a panorama of the matrices of Brazilian aesthetic language in one of the most important cultural institutions in the country.
Marisa Moreira Salles and Tomas Alvim
Virtual Exhibitions
With the theme “Colonialism”, the third edition of the exhibition “Asia: the Earth, the Men, the Gods” addresses the hegemonic and mutant impulse of one group over another, which has been the tonic of the curve of civilizations. The exhibition brings to the public a selection of approximately 3,000 works of Asian art belonging to the MON collection and promotes reflection on the different interpretations of colonialism in Asia.
