Walkthrough: Chico da Silva, the Pirambu School and Collective Authorship
Michael Asbury and Ileana L. Selejan invite you to join them in discussing the work of our currently exhibiting artist Chico da Silva and the Pirambu school. The conversation will be driven by questions around authorship, collectivity, so-called ‘outsider’ art, indigeneity, the politics of the art world, belonging and commodification.
Chico da Silva is often said to have been "discovered" by Jean-Pierre Chabloz, a Swiss artist and critic, who, found himself in the coastal city of Fortaleza, in the northeast of Brazil, in the 1940s. Initially introduced to Brazilian and international audiences as an ‘índio brasileiro’ (Brazilian ‘Indian’) who reinvented painting, employing a ‘primitivist’ aesthetic’, da Silva’s work fit uneasily within prescriptive art historical and institutional categories. The founding of the Pirambu School, where canvases were produced collectively, furthermore complicated and disrupted these assumptions.
How was indigeneity instrumentalised to both exoticise and commercialise da Silva’s work? And how did the activities and outputs of the Pirambu school problematise the idea of individual genius and authenticity? This talk will consider examples from across Latin America of similar practices often cast under the umbrella of ‘primitivism’, and will reflect on the repercussions of these debates for contemporary Indigenous and popular artists from the region.
Dr. Michael Asbury is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art with a focus on Brazil, and Deputy Director of the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London. He has authored and/or edited several books, including: Antonio Manuel: Occupations Discoveries (2005); Detanico & Lain: After Utopia (2006); Anna Maria Maiolino: Order and Subjectivity (2009); Julio Vilani: It's a Game (2010); Iberê Camargo: O Carretel (2013); Marcelo Silveira ATA (2022); Floriano Romano: A Pele do Mundo (2023); and most recently Today is Always Yesterday: Brazilian Contemporary Art (Reaktion, 2024). As a curator he has worked on exhibitions such as Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis (Tate Modern, 2001), Cildo Meireles (Tate Modern/Chelsea College of Arts, 2008) Rosangela Rennó (Pharos, 2009), The Neoconcrete Experience (Gallery 32, 2009), Anna Maria Maiolino (Camden Arts Centre, 2010), Alfredo Volpi (Cecilia Brunson Projects, 2016), The Monochrome in Contemporary Art (Nara Roesler Gallery, 2017) and Lygia Clark: the I and the You (Whitechapel Gallery, 2024).
Dr. Ileana L. Selejan is a photography scholar and curator, currently Lecturer in Art History, Culture and Society at the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. A member of the PhotoDemos research collective, she was previously Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at University College London and contributor to the European Research Council (ERC) funded project, Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination. She has held curatorial, research and teaching positions at various institutions including Central Saint Martins and the Decolonising Arts Institute, University of the Arts London, The Davis Museum at Wellesley College, New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, the Parsons School of Design, and the Fine Arts Department at West University, Timisoara, Romania. Dr. Selejan is also a member of the experimental arts collective kinema ikon.
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This event will be held in Gallery 1.
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