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.

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

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.

Papers:

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).

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).

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.

Further speakers TBA