Ayrson Heráclito
22 May - 20 Jun 2015
AYRSON HERÁCLITO
Genealogy of Materials
22 May - 20 June 2015
This exhibition shows a poetic translation of the artistic use of affect and belonging as sources of inspiration. After an eight weeks residency, Ayrson Heráclito creates an installation that includes his newly produced site specific video performance work on Goree Island, The Reencounter of the Atlantic Shores. The Brazilian artist also shows an overview of the subjects and objects that inhabit and animate his work. Coming from Salvador (Bahia), organic materials are central elements in Heráclito’s work. His work is grounded in the idea of the purge of the Afro-Brazilian history as a possible redemption of the past to act in the present.
In his practice, materials such as sugar, palm oil, meat, salt, okra, corn and beans among others serve to establish a grammar of inequalities forged by the global history of African dispersions. These materials carry as many meanings and stories as the multiplicities of their use in contemporary art. The exhibition includes phothographs, sculptures, videos and installations.
About the artist: Ayrson Heráclito
Visual artist and curator, completing a Doctorate degree in Communications and Semiotics at the Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC – SP). Professor of Visual Arts at the Center of Arts and Humanities at the Federal University of the Recôncavo of Bahia (UFRB). The artist’s works – comprising installation, performance, photography, and audiovisual media – incorporate elements of Afro-Brazilian culture and have been featured in exhibits, festivals, and biennials throughout Brazil as well as in Europe and Africa. In the works of Heráclito are included elements such as palm oil, life in the Brazilian colonial era, jerky, sugar, fish, sperm and blood, body pain, raptures, apartheid and dreams of freedom.
Genealogy of Materials
22 May - 20 June 2015
This exhibition shows a poetic translation of the artistic use of affect and belonging as sources of inspiration. After an eight weeks residency, Ayrson Heráclito creates an installation that includes his newly produced site specific video performance work on Goree Island, The Reencounter of the Atlantic Shores. The Brazilian artist also shows an overview of the subjects and objects that inhabit and animate his work. Coming from Salvador (Bahia), organic materials are central elements in Heráclito’s work. His work is grounded in the idea of the purge of the Afro-Brazilian history as a possible redemption of the past to act in the present.
In his practice, materials such as sugar, palm oil, meat, salt, okra, corn and beans among others serve to establish a grammar of inequalities forged by the global history of African dispersions. These materials carry as many meanings and stories as the multiplicities of their use in contemporary art. The exhibition includes phothographs, sculptures, videos and installations.
About the artist: Ayrson Heráclito
Visual artist and curator, completing a Doctorate degree in Communications and Semiotics at the Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC – SP). Professor of Visual Arts at the Center of Arts and Humanities at the Federal University of the Recôncavo of Bahia (UFRB). The artist’s works – comprising installation, performance, photography, and audiovisual media – incorporate elements of Afro-Brazilian culture and have been featured in exhibits, festivals, and biennials throughout Brazil as well as in Europe and Africa. In the works of Heráclito are included elements such as palm oil, life in the Brazilian colonial era, jerky, sugar, fish, sperm and blood, body pain, raptures, apartheid and dreams of freedom.