Performance "A Maze in Grace" by Neo Muyanga with Legítima Defesa and Bianca Turner pat the 34th Bienal de São Paulo opening. 08/02/2020 © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

The project received funding because of:
The international biennial includes several Nordic artists. The fund sees that this will add a new value on Nordic arts and culture. The Bienal de São Paulo will also have positive effects on the artists work.

The applicant wrote about the project:
The 34th edition of the Bienal de São Paulo states that it is necessary to abandon narrow and monolithic viewpoints to become open to the multiplicity of possible relations under constant evolution. In the polarized context in Brazil and worldwide today, where the different sides are increasingly closed off to each other and to dialogue, these lessons become urgent and necessary.

The Bienal points to the potential of art as resiliency, reinvention, repetition, translation and opacity. In this sense, the project claims the right to complexity and ambivalence in expressions of art and culture, as well as in the identities of social groups and subjects, offering alternatives to the brutish antagonism that has come to characterize the political and social arena in recent years. More than being linked to a single theme, thesis or discourse, the 34th Bienal de São Paulo is articulated based on multiple relationships that are instated among artistic, thematic, conceptual and institutional issues in an event of this size.

One of the essential premises of the 34th Bienal is to emphasize the relationships established between different works and artists as a way of enabling a broader understanding of contemporary production. Recent or commissioned works will be placed in parallel with the production of previous decades, thus evidencing artistic lineages.