Artist: Virginia Sousa de Medeiros
Dates of residency: July-August
Born: 1973
Hometown: Feira de Santana, Brazil
Lives and works: São Paulo, SP, Brazil
Education: 2002 Master in Visual Arts, Escola de Belas Artes [School of Fine Arts] (UFBA), Salvador, Bahia, Brazil; 1997 Bachelorship IN Plastic Arts, Escola de Belas Artes [School of Fine Arts] (UFBA), Salvador, Bahia, Brazil
BIO/ STATEMENT:
The work of Virginia de Medeiros centers on documentary strategies, as a means to transgress mainstream accounts and question the boundaries between reality and fiction. “Walking, observing places, people, and situations, and understanding the street as a powerful laboratory for creation…My work involves an anthropological pathos, I seek to experience a world different from my own. This sort of experience involves contradictions, tensions, challenges, deconstructions, destabilizations and mutations. The Other is not just the dissimilar person, the stranger, the person on the fringe of society, the excluded – it is also a feeling of incompleteness that keeps us in suspense, unfinished, waiting for ourselves. An encounter that requires time, complicity and a willingness to approach what seems distant to us”.
Working primarily with video and audiovisual installations, de Medeiros’ practice is both subjective and conceptual and seeks to revise the representation of reality and alterity. It deals with three main themes bridging art and documentary: dislocation, participation, and fabulation.
Virginia is the recipient of the 2013 Videobrasil Festival award that she won for her film “Sergio and Simone”…
http://www.icco.art.br/virginia-de-medeiros-wins-the-icco-videobrasil-grant?lang=eng
http://site.videobrasil.org.br/ She is currently preparing new work for the 2014 31º São Paulo Biennal.
Previously she participated among others at the 27º São Paulo Biennial; Itinerario, Itinerância: 32º Panorama of Brazilian Art, Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo (2011); 2º Trienal de Luanda: Geografias Emocionais Arte e Afecto. Luanda, Angola (2010) ; É Claro que Você Sabe do que Estou Falando? Vermelho Art Gallery, São Paulo, São Paulo (2008).
GALLERIES: Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
SELECT PERMANENT COLLECTIONS:
Contemporary Art Museum, Ceará, Fortaleza, Brazil
Sao Paulo Cultural Center, São Paulo, SP, Brazil
Banco do Nordeste Cultural Center, Ceará, Brazil
SUPPORT: Virginia de Medeiros’ residency is supported by Icco (Institute for Contemporary Culture) in partnership with the 18th Videobrasil Festival.
