INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION OF PUBLIC ART TRANSFORMS
RIO DE JANEIRO INTO MUSEUM AL FRESCO
The biennial project OiR, which begins this September and ends with the 2016
Olympics, promotes original interventions by renowned artists in picture-postcard
locations around the city
The event is sponsored by HSBC, Oi, the Government of Rio de Janeiro State, and
the City Government of Rio de Janeiro, with cultural support from Oi Futuro and the
Ministry of Culture
After accommodating a major conference dedicated to the environment and in the
imminence of hosting two athletic events of gargantuan proportions, Rio de Janeiro,
starting in September, will also receive one of the largest exhibitions of public art
ever held in the country. Every two years through 2016—in the wake of Rio+20 and
simultaneously with the World Cup and then the Olympics—, the unprecedented
project OiR—Other Ideas for Rio will invite internationally renowned artists to
interfere in emblematic locations in the city’s urban landscape. Works in this first
phase carry the signature of British artists Andy Goldsworthy (Cais do Porto) and
Brian Eno (Arcos da Lapa), Spanish artist Jaume Plensa (Enseada de Botafogo),
American Robert Morris (Cinelândia), Japanese Ryoji Ikeda (Arpoador), and
Brazilian Henrique Oliveira (Parque Madureira). Sponsored by HSBC Bank, Oi, the
Government of the State of Rio de Janeiro, and the Rio de Janeiro City
Government, the event also has cultural support from Oi Futuro and the Ministry of
Culture (MinC).
“Public art enhances urban space and makes cities more pleasant by bringing the
work of art into communion with the landscape, in addition to stimulating the pride of
the people who live in them,” explains curator Marcello Dantas, who conceived the
event in partnership with NAU Art Consulting, a firm belonging to collector and
businessman Guilherme de Magalhães Pinto Gonçalves. “And Rio, with its
exuberant geography, is the most perfect of scenarios for this kind of event,” Dantas
adds.
“OiR’s innovative open air exhibition will be visible to everyone who lives in Rio or is
passing through,” says José Augusto da Gama Figueira, President of Oi Futuro.
“It has everything to do with democratizing access to culture, one of the major
missions of Oi Futuro and focus of our Public Art Program.”
The name OiR—“Rio” spelled backwards—refers precisely to the idea of thinking
about the city in a different way. The project aims to revive and update the tradition
of invoking an outsider’s gaze over the Rio de Janeiro landscape, initiated when
adventurers and European explorers in the earliest expeditions moored their vessels
in the bay to attempt unveiling and translating the mysteries of the new territory.
More recently, that tradition was revisited in the essays of illustrious thinkers such as
Franco-Belgian anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and Austrian writer Stefan Zweig.
Some of the world’s most important metropolitan centers promote initiatives of a
similar nature. This has been the case in Chicago (Millennium Park), New York
(Public Art Fund), and London (Art Angel), where such projects have resulted in a
transformation of the way people perceive the city and how they interact with public
space.
According to Dantas, public art also has an important social aspect because “it
brings people from different social classes together around a concept that makes
them open their eyes to the new and to their own heritage, in addition to creating a
unique space, a meeting place and a landmark in the city.”
Works in the initial phase of the project are inspired by the theme “The Milieu”,
which, in the words of the curator, focuses on “the space we occupy, that which
unites us”.
ABOUT THE WORKS
Jaume Plensa—“Awilda”
Where: Enseada de Botafogo
September 7—November 2
One of the world’s most respected artists of public works, the Spaniard Jaume
Plensa will install an enormous floating head in the Botafogo bay. The artist will
produce the work in Brazil, and a Niterói shipyard is developing a special platform to
support the installation, which has a height of 12 meters (39 feet).
Andy Goldsworthy—“Clay Dome”
Where: Galpão da Ação da Cidadania
September 7—November 2
The English artist Andy Goldsworthy has created an enormous, penetrable clay
dome which will provoke an unaccustomed sense of strangeness when observed
from a door installed in an outside wall of the ‘Centro Cultural da Ação da Cidadania’
on the Quayside. The rounded construction is so delicate that one of its attributes is
ephemerality—it could collapse at any moment.
Robert Morris—“Glass Labyrinth”
Where: Cinelândia
September 7—November 2
The veteran American sculptor Robert Morris, one of the originators of the Minimalist
movement, has chosen to produce his intervention in Cinelândia. He will construct a
triangular glass labyrinth, open for visitation, in the plaza between the Câmara dos
Vereadores (City Council) and the Teatro Municipal.
Henrique Oliveira—Shellshelter
Where: Parque Madureira
September 7—November 2
Internationally renowned Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira will occupy a section of the
newly inaugurated Madureira Park, in the northern part of the city, with one of his
monumental, penetrable sculptures built of scrap wood scavenged around the city.
The proposal to insert a work by Oliveira at this site retrieves, poetically, the
relationship of the land now occupied by the park to the shantytown that occupied it
in the past.
Ryoji Ikeda—the radar
Where: Praia do Diabo
September 7—9
Ryoji Ikeda is a Japanese artist based in Paris whose work has always been
connected to images and sounds, and to the effects produced in people when those
features are combined. For OiR, the artist will devise an audiovisual show at Praia
do Diabo, Arpoador: a projection system suspended from a tower approximately 15
meters (49 feet) high will transform the site’s sandy beaches into an outsize screen
during three consecutive nights. The installation will be open to the public.
Brian Eno – 77 million paintings
Where: Arcos da Lapa
October 19—21
Brian Eno is a musician, composer, singer and visual artist, famous for having been a
member of Roxie Music, legendary band from the 1970’s, and for producing music
for David Bowie, U2 and Coldplay. For OiR, the English artist has developed an
audacious projection system, mapped out exclusively for the Arcos da Lapa—the
city’s liveliest nightlife venue. He will project 77 million digital paintings on the white
walls of the archaic aqueduct during three nights.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Robert Morris—Cinelândia
Robert Morris is a veteran artist whose works, today, are distributed among the
world’s greatest museums. Besides being one of the founders of Minimalism, Morris
made important contributions to the development of land art, performance, and
installation art. He was an innovator and his series of Labyrinths revolutionized art:
static observers were made to participate in the work, moving in the choreography he
had established.
Jaume Plensa—Enseada de Botafogo
Jaume Plensa has built an international reputation with his monumental public art
works, such as the Crown Fountain in Chicago, which became a symbol of the city.
His engaging works can be found worldwide and his work is exhibited in museums
and galleries in Europe, Japan and the United States.
Andy Goldsworthy—Cais do Porto
Andy Goldsworthy is a British artist who uses a vast range of natural materials—
leaves, stones, clay, snow, ice, feathers, petals and many others—to produce works
of art in collaboration with nature. Most of his works are done outdoors in places as
diverse as the North Pole and the Australian Outback. He is considered one of the
greatest present-day sculptors of land art.
Ryoiji Ikeday—Arpoador
Ryoiji Ikeda is a Paris-based Japanese artist whose work deals with the essential
qualities of sound, which he manipulates in concerts, recordings, publications and
installations. For Ikeda, music and mathematics are sister disciplines, and listening
to music is equivalent to diving into the world of numbers. In his work, the public is
actor, and the interaction with the sound and music, a vehicle of authentic
experience.
Brian Eno—Arcos da Lapa
Brian Eno is a musician, composer, singer and visual artist, famous as part of the
legendary Roxy Music band in the 1970s and as music producer for David Bowie, U2
and Coldplay. But in his 25-year career dedicated to the visual arts, the British artist
has created abstract works, painting with light, making “visual music”, often
combining installations of projectors with sound-generating systems, producing
hybrid works that captivate the public.
Henrique Oliveira—Parque Madureira
A Brazilian artist who sees beauty in discarded materials, Henrique Oliveira
contrives to transform wooden construction barriers into grandiose works of art. The
plasticity and sophistication in the movement of the curves and large-scale amoeboid
forms observed in his works are achieved with a profusion of those disfigured scraps
with faded colors which, in certain situations, seem to swallow us up.
His installations establish a dialogue with the sites where they are exhibited such that
the works or installations can no longer be seen simply as sculptures or paintings.
Oliveira, who is considered one of the great names in contemporary Brazilian art,
has had works shown in the São Paulo Biennial, Bould Museum (USA), Monterrey
Biennial (Mexico), Contemporary Arts Center (USA), among many others.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Marcello Dantas, curator and museum-maker, is the mind behind some of the best
museums and shows of recent years in Brazil: “Bossa in the Wigwam (Oca)”,
“Robert Carlos—50 years of music”, “Water in the Wigwam (Oca)”, “50 years of TV
and+”, Museum of the Portuguese Language, Museum of American Man, Museums
of Telecommunications, Museum of Mines and Metal, as well as exhibitions of
renowned artists from abroad such as Antony Gormley, Christian Boltanski, Anish
Kapoor, Bill Viola and Laurie Anderson—not to mention international projects such as
the Museum of the Caribbean, in Barranquilla (Colombia), and “Pelé Station”, in
Berlin during the World Cup in Germany. He was responsible for innovating the
concept of museology in Brazil, tempering it with an unprecedented dose of
technology, interactivity and multimedia features so as to offer the visitor what he
calls total immersion.
ABOUT THE PUBLIC ART PROGRAM OF OI FUTURO
OiR is part of the Oi Futuro Public Art Program, which has been carrying out urban
interventions since its inception, reaffirming the goal of stimulating the enjoyment of
art and increasing its visibility.
The Oi Futuro project, with its mission of
democratizing access to culture, overflows the physical space of its cultural centers,
taking contemporary art to the appreciation of the greatest possible number of
people, using large urban areas to make possible a closer dialogue between art and
the public. The public experiments of Oi Futuro have involved artists like Giancarlo
Neri, who brought millions of colored lights to Praça Paris for the “Maximum Silence
in Paris” installation in January, 2012; Tadeu Jungle, who released balloons on
Ipanema beach and on Avenida Paulista in the 2011 intervention, “The Arrow”;
Miguel Chevalier, who took a container to Praça General Osório and invited the
public to create fractal flowers in an installation of the “Power Pixels” exhibition. In
2009, Oi Futuro launched Peter Coffin’s flying saucer—a seven-meter (23 foot)
diameter installation with big luminous screens—over Rio’s beaches, in front of about
500 thousand people. Vik Muniz, Xico Chaves, Ferreira Gullar, Antonio Cicero,
Marcos Chaves, Roberto Correa dos Santos and Wlademir Dias-Pino also figure
among the artists who have participated in public art projects undertaken by Oi
Futuro.
Information for the press:
Canivello/Factoria Comunicação
Vanessa Cardoso – [email protected]
Eduardo Marques – [email protected]
Tel. (21) 2274.0131 / 2239.0835
Information about Oi Futuro:
Corporate Communication – Oi
Carla Meneghini
Tel. (21) 3131-1603 / 8834-8827
[email protected]