contemporary art

ROSÂNGELA RENNÓ
Ring
24 November – 15 January 2010
www.pharosart.org
www.rosangelarenno.com.br/obras

The Pharos Centre for Contemporary Art is pleased to present works by artist Rosângela Rennó in an exhibition titled Ring. The exhibition is part of the Brazilian Culture Month 2009, which is organised by the Pharos Arts Foundation in cooperation with the Brazilian Embassy in Cyprus. The opening will take place on Monday 23 November at 8pm.

Rosângela Rennó’s work is predominantly photography based, although she rarely takes photographs of her subjects, instead, she recasts and transforms appropriated photographic images. In the past she has presented anonymous portraits compiled from existing photographs – photographers’ studios and even photographs of prisoners’ tattoos. Whilst she finds novel and often politically charged ways of presenting the images, her work is also profoundly humane, as the viewer finds themselves imagining other people’s lives, particularly those who are marginalized or unacknowledged.

She represented Brazil at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. Rosângela Rennó was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in 1962. She lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.

The Last Photo
2006

I invited 43 professional photographers to photograph the Christ the Redeemer monument in Rio de Janeiro using mechanical cameras of different formats that I have collected over the last fifteen years. The cameras range from a 4×5 plate camera from the beginning of the twentieth century to a 35mm reflex camera from the 1980s. The cameras were used for the last time; they were then sealed. The photographs were edited by their authors and myself. The project The last photo [A última foto] consists of 43 diptychs, each pairing the cameras with the last photo they registered. So long, photography.

Bibliotheca
2002

37 vitrines containing photo albums and digital color photographs mounted on Plexiglas, one map and one painted steel file.

Immemorial
1994

In her series Immemorial (1994), Rosângela Rennó showed an installation of fifty photographs that yield dark portraits of workers and children who built Brasília, the capital whose architectural design was championed for its utopian vision. In a warehouse of the Public Archive of the Federal District, Rennó found suitcases of more than 15,000 files concerning the employees of the government construction company Novacap. In Immemorial, she uses stories that told of a massacre in the workers’ barracks and of dozens of workers who had died in the building of Brasília and been buried in the foundations. In the archives, these workers were classified under the heading ‘dismissed due death’.

In “Experiencing Cinema,” a better use of atmospherics, Brazilian Rosangela Renno revives an early 19th century phantasmagoria practice of projecting still pictures onto veils of smoke. Photographs, gathered from found family albums, cohere briefly on the smoke screen; then both image and screen dissipate, mortality again provocatively aligned with ephemerality.