Marcelo Campos
Marcelo Campos was born, lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. He is an associate professor at the Department of Theory and History of Art at the Instituto de Artes da UERJ. He is the curator at the Rio Art Museum. He was the director of the França-Brazil Housel between 2016 and 2017. He is a professor at the Parque Lage School of Visual Arts and a member of the boards of the Paço Imperial Museum (RJ) and the Bispo do Rosário Museum of Contemporary Art (RJ). He holds a PhD in Visual Arts from the PPGAV of the School of Fine Arts at UFRJ (2005). He developed a doctoral thesis studying the concept of Brazilianness in contemporary art. He has published texts on Brazilian art in national and international periodicals, books and catalogs. In the book “Escultura Contemporânea no Brasil: reflexões em dez percursos“ (“Contemporary sculpture in Brazil: reflexions in ten courses”) (Salvador: Caramurê Publishing, 2016), Campos reviews his analysis and includes a significant part of modern and contemporary Brazilian production in a survey of more than 90 artists. Since 2004, he has curated exhibitions at several institutions in Brazil, some of which are cited below.
African and Afro-Brazilian matrices are researched in exhibitions such as "Bispo do Rosário, um canto, dois sertões" (“Bispo do Rosário: a chant, two backlands”), at the Bispo do Rosário Museum of Contemporary Art, in 2015; "Orixás", Casa França Brasil, 2016; “Rio do Samba: resistência e reinvenção“ (“Rio of Samba: resistance and reinvention”), Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR), 2018, together with Evandro Salles, Nei Lopes and Clarissa Diniz. In 2018, a major exhibition updated the mapping of the Northeast region, including research and fieldwork in all states of the region, together with curators Clarissa Diniz and Bitú Cassundé, resulting in a large-scale exhibition at Sesc 24 de Maio, in São Paulo. Currently, he coordinates research on Afro-descendant artists in the extension project “Arte e Afrobrasilidade“ (“Art and afrobrazilianess”).
Research project
Title
On the frontiers of art: contemporary reflexivities
Area of Inquiry and Research
Art and Otherness
Description
This project proposes studies and analysis on the reflexivities of the art object. It seeks, in different images and narratives, to understand the conditions that underlie objects and subjects in a supposed production of art that is contextualized in identity discourses. Anthropology and art warn us that action is limited to ethos and worldviews, which drives us to reflect on the intersectionality between ethnicities, genders, social classes, in what has come to be called “post-colonialism”. The narrator assumes instances of a producer of gestures and, above all, a protagonist, inserting himself, many times, as a critic of the current discourses. In this way, art is exposed as a political strategy to sociocultural belongings.
Efrain Almeida. Hummingbirds. Sculpture in polychrome bronze, 2015.
Photo: Wilton Montenegro.