Talk

Brazilian Modernisms and Beyond: Symposium

Friday 4 April 2025 10am - 6pm

The Benjamin West Lecture Theatre | Burlington Gardens

Symposium

£45/£15. Includes early-morning access to the RA’s exhibition Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism from 8.30am, light refreshments and a drinks reception.

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Friends of the RA book first

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Made possible by the Armando Garza-Sada Sr. Endowment for the Arts

Explore the vibrant and multi-faceted aspects of Brazilian Modernisms in this one-day symposium.

Delving into Brazil’s vast artistic and cultural modernist output, this symposium is conceived to complement our exhibition Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism. It will bring together international artists, scholars and academics to illuminate the rich Brazilian cultural tapestry of the twentieth century, including how this vibrant period of cultural production is responded to today.

From the visual arts, to architecture and urban planning, new research will analyse complex interactions between Western, Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous cultural models, as well as the development of Brazilian artistic and cultural expressions. The conversation will aim to capture the bold and contrasting cultures which still shape today’s country.

If you have any access requirements that you’d like to discuss, please contact public.programmes@royalacademy.org.uk.

£45/£15. Includes early-morning access to the RA’s exhibition Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism from 8.30am, light refreshments and a drinks reception.

Book now

Friends of the RA book first

Join now

Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism

Go to the exhibition

Made possible by the Armando Garza-Sada Sr. Endowment for the Arts

About the speakers

Artist keynote:

Dr. Ana Maria Tavares holds a Master’s degree in fine arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD from the University of São Paulo. She is present in many public and private collections in Brazil and abroad. In Tavares’ production, the understanding that tropical nature and architecture are ideological constructions in the triad modernism | modernity | modernisation, leads to works that interrogate the political, economic and social implications of the modern movement in Brazil. Her work addresses dichotomies such as progress and regression, beauty and ugliness, purity and contamination, as well as questioning gender, race and otherness – themes commonly ignored in the more celebratory views of modernism.

Chairs and Contributors:

Dr Michael Asbury is an Anglo-Brazilian scholar, art critic, curator, founding member and deputy director of the research centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) at Chelsea College of Arts, UAL. He has written extensively on Brazilian modern and contemporary art and is the author of 'Today is Always Yesterday: Contemporary Brazilian Art', (Reaktion 2023) and Marcelo Silveira: ATA (Nara Roesler Books 2022), amongst others. He has contributed to numerous edited books and catalogues including: Mario Pedrosa Revolução Sensível, SESC / Perseu Abramo, São Paulo, 2023; Bienal de São Paulo since 1951, São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2022; Form and Feeling: the making of concretism in Brazil, New York, The Bronx Museum and Fordham U.P., 2021; Senza Margine, Maxxi Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome, 2021; Paulo Nazareth: Melee, ICA Miami, 2021; The Art of Diplomacy, Brazilian Embassy in London, 2018; New Worlds: Frontiers, Inclusion, Utopias, The Getty Research, CIHA-Brazil: Rio de Janeiro, 2017. Curatorial projects include: Lygia Clark: The I and the You, (Whitechapel Gallery 2024); Floriano Romano, (Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro, 2023); Purity is a Myth: the monochrome in contemporary art (Nara Roesler 2017); Ibere Camargo (Fundação Ibere Camargo, 2013); Anna Maria Maiolino (Camden Arts Centre, 2010).

Dr. Rafael Cardoso is an art historian and writer. He completed a PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art and has been professor at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro and Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro. He has also been a visiting researcher at the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles), Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art (Paris) and Yale University (New Haven), as well as holding the Aby Warburg Guest Professorship at Warburg Haus (Hamburg) in 2024. He is currently a member of the postgraduate faculty in art history (PPGHA) at Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro and a research associate at the Lateinamerika-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin. His most recent publication is Modernity in Black and White: Art and Image, Race and Identity in Brazil, 1890-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Keyna Eleison, Curator, writer, researcher, Griot heiress and shaman, narrator, singer, ancestral chronicler, cultural manager. She has a master's degree in Art History and a specialist degree in History and Architecture from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) and a bachelor's degree in Philosophy from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). She was a member of the African Heritage Commission for the laureation of the Cais do Valongo region as a World Heritage Site (UNESCO). She was the manager of all the cultural centers in the Municipality of Rio de Janeiro between 2015 and 2017. Pedagogical coordinator of the Escola Livre de Artes Visuais - Parque Lage between 2018 and 2019. Curator of the 10th SIART International Biennial in Bolivia and artistic director of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (MAM Rio) between 2020 and 2023, curator of the first Amazon Biennial, 2023. She is currently a columnist for Contemporary &, Director of Research and Content for the Amazon Biennial and At Large Co-curator of the 36th São Paulo Biennial. She works in the development of exhibitions and meanings of works of art and artists, guiding artistic processes, curating exhibitions, teaching art, with the precedent of coordinating art education and storytelling reinforcing the relationship of passage and capturing oral knowledge.

Dr Sofia Gotti is an art historian and curator specializing in modern and contemporary art, with a focus on politics, feminism, and decoloniality in Latin America and the Global South. She is currently a Lecturer in Curating at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Previously she taught at the University of Cambridge, and was part of the curatorial team of Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, the 60th International Art Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia.

Dr. Jane Hall is the inaugural recipient of the British Council Lina Bo Bardi Fellowship (2013) and a founding member of the architecture collective Assemble. Jane completed a PhD at the Royal College of Art, where her research considered the legacy of modernist architects in Brazil and the UK in the immediate postwar period. She is a Bye-Fellow at King’s College, the University of Cambridge (2024-), specialising in the intersections of gender and architecture and the author of two books, Breaking Ground: Architecture by Women (2019) and Woman Made (2021).

Diane Lima is a Brazilian curator, scholar, and a key black feminist voice in Latin American Art. Most recently, she has organized choreographies of the impossible, the 35th São Paulo Bienal (2023), Paulo Nazareth: Luzia at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City (2024), The River is a Serpente, the 3rd Frestas Triennial of Arts (2020/2021), and the two-year program Absent Dialogues at Itaú Cultural (São Paulo, 2016–2017), which played a historic role in shaping the Brazilian anticolonial turning point in contemporary art. In 2025, Lima was appointed as part of the Scientific Advisory Board of documenta and MuseumFridericianum gGmbH in Germany, and she currently serves as Programming Director for the ESAP Fellowship 2025, an initiative led by the A&L Berg Foundation that provides professional development to Latinx curators in the United States. In 2024, Lima was a Guest Professor at the Institute of Aesthetic Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She is the recipient of a 2021 Ford Foundation Global Fellowship, a program that celebrates the next generation of social justice leaders worldwide. Lima edited the critically-acclaimed anthology Negros na Piscina: Arte Contemporânea, Curadoria e Educação (Blacks in the Pool: Contemporary Art, Curatorship and Education) (Fósforo, 2024), which chronicles the last ten years of the debate around raciality and art in Brazil. She also co-edited the volume Textes à lire à voix haute (Texts to read aloud), which united anticolonial dissident voices across Lusophone-Francophone contexts (Brook, 2022).

Dr Adrian Locke is Chief Curator at the RA who has curated many ground-breaking and award-winning exhibitions from major surveys of contemporary artists, including Anish Kapoor, Ai Weiwei, and William Kentridge to cultural explorations such as Aztecs, Turks: A journey of a Thousand Years, 600-1600, and Oceania. He has also collaborated on exhibitions with institutions across the world.

Dr. Panu Minkkinen is Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Currently his chair also covers socio-legal studies and law and gender studies. His main research interests include law and architecture, law and the humanities, as well as ethnographic approaches to law.

Dr. Adjoa Osei is a Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. Her research explores themes that are at the intersection of Performing Arts, Brazilian Studies, and Francophone Studies. Osei is a BBC New Generation Thinker, with a growing portfolio of media work. Prior to her career as a public intellectual, Osei worked internationally as a showgirl. Her new book Elsie Houston: Revolutionary Soprano uncovers the story of the extraordinary Elsie Houston - a Brazilian, mixed-race, classically trained soprano who performed from Europe to the Americas.

Dr Roger Sansi is a socio-cultural anthropologist (Ph.D. University of Chicago 2003). He has been Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths University of London. Currently he his Professor in Social Anthropology at Universitat de Barcelona, Spain. He has done research on Afro-Brazilian art and culture, the concept of the fetish in the colonial world, and contemporary art in Spain. His publications include the books Fetishes and Monuments: Afro- Brazilian art and culture in the 20th century (Berghahn 2007), Sorcery in the Black Atlantic (edited with L. Nicolau, Chicago UP 2011), Economies of relation: Money and Personalism in the Lusophone World (U. of New England Press 2013). Art, Anthropology and the Gift (Bloomsbury 2015); The Anthropologist as Curator (Routledge 2019) and The Trouble with Art: An Anthropology beyond Philistinism (Routledge 2024).

Dr Isobel Whitelegg is a writer, curator and historian of art and its institutions. She is Associate Professor at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, where she teaches art museum and gallery studies, co-leads the research group Cr/ia (Creative Research/Instituting Art) and serves as Director of Postgraduate Research for the College of Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities. Her research focuses on the relationship between artistic practices and shifting institutional contexts in Brazil during the seventies and eighties - a period that spans the military regime’s repressive nadir with the process of political opening. Publications in this area include ‘How to Talk About Biennials That Don’t Exist: Reassembling the Twelfth São Paulo Biennial’ (Tate Papers 34, 2022).
The exhibitions she has curated include “Signals, if you like I shall grow” (Thomas Dane, London; kurimazutto, New York) and “Cinthia Marcelle, A conjunction of factors” (MACBA, Barcelona). She regularly writes about artists in/from Brazil, most recently on Cinthia Marcelle and Tiago Macha Machado’s new work Acumulação Primitiva (Primitive Accumulation) for the exhibition “Nebula”, commissioned and produced by Fondazione in Between Art Film on the occasion of the Biennale Arte, Venice, 2024.