Programação
MAM São Paulo Meets Instituto Tomie Ohtake: Here-elsewhere
Exhibition
from September 03 to November 02, 2025
FREE ENTRY VISITATION ACESS UNTIL 18H FREE CONTENT
FREE ENTRY VISITATION ACESS UNTIL 18H FREE CONTENT
Current
MAM São Paulo Meets Instituto Tomie Ohtake: Here-elsewhere
Curated by Ana Roman, Cauê Alves, Gabriela Gotoda e Paulo Miyada
The collective exhibition Here-elsewhere addresses identities and cultures that are not restricted to a single territory but are built across multiple places simultaneously—the interconnected “here” and “elsewhere”.
“For the poet Édouard Glissant, contrary to what some may claim, the diversity that emerges from movements between territories enriches the experience of places, bringing them into relation with all the languages and places of the world. Based on this premise, the exhibition proposes an exercise in listening and approaching, in which works from the MAM collection are brought together through the intersection of traces—at times resonating, at times diverging. More than illustrating displacements, the works incorporate them as material, gesture, and thought,” affirm the curators of the show.
The list of works includes Anna Bella Geiger, Carla Zaccagnini, Emmanuel Nassar, Hudinilson Júnior, Ivens Machado, Judith Lauand, León Ferrari, Lívio Abramo, Lothar Charoux, Lourival Cuquinha, Lydia Okumura, Madalena Schwartz, Maureen Bisilliat, Megumi Yuasa, Nazareth Pacheco, Paulo Bruscky, Rafael França, and Sara Ramo. The body of works addresses, through different approaches, issues related to otherness, diasporic and migratory displacements and flows, as well as the processes of permanence and transformation of identities within these contexts.
The program MAM São Paulo meets Instituto Tomie Ohtake was born from the dialogue between two organizations committed to expanding access to art and strengthening its public dimension. More than a one-off initiative prompted by the temporary closure of MAM’s headquarters for the renovation of the Ibirapuera Park Marquise, the project is part of a cycle of cooperation that promotes the circulation of collections, the exchange of knowledge, and shared curatorial and educational experiences.
The Ministry of Culture, the Municipal Department of Culture and Creative Economy of the City of São Paulo, the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, and Instituto Tomie Ohtake present this exhibition.
Participating artists
Anna Bella Geiger
A critical approach to cartography runs through several works by Anna Bella Geiger. The artist uses maps to reflect on how territories and cultures are represented, as well as to challenge the very notion of borders. Her prints combine various techniques such as aquatint, etching, photocopy, and screen printing, along with drawings and collages on paper. These works aimed to rethink the place of Brazil and Latin America on maps, both culturally and politically. In many of her works, the notion of Brazilian national identity is discussed through the relationship between geographic territories and their cultural ties. Traditional cartographic representations reveal themselves to be loaded with political and ideological interests. The distortions in maps—in their meridians and parallels—are not accidental: they reflect geopolitical powers, interests, and hierarchies. Ultimately, by representing topographic features, continents, and seas, Anna Bella Geiger’s maps draw attention to how cartography—beyond being an instrument for spatial domination—can symbolically reorder the way the world is imagined and the power relations contained within it.
Carla Zaccagnini
Carla Zaccagnini’s practice weaves together research and writing, focusing primarily on the backstage of the art circuit—its modes of circulation, negotiation, and memory—and on the institutional and discursive structures that shape what can be seen, said, and remembered.
The exhibition presents Panorama (2001), originally conceived for the 27th Panorama of Brazilian Art—a show marked by institutional critique and engagement with sociopolitical issues. On that occasion, Zaccagnini displayed ten enlarged aerial photographs of the Brazilian coastline, originally taken for military purposes in the 1930s. The negatives belonged to the now-defunct Museu da Aeronáutica da Fundação Santos-Dumont [Aeronautics Museum of the Santos-Dumont Foundation], which was then housed in the Oca—a building claimed by MAM São Paulo, the organizer of the show. The work reveals connections between territory, power, and visuality, while also making explicit the disputes over space and narrative within the institutional art circuit. The project also included a news report on Edemar Cid Ferreira’s role in the museum’s removal from the Oca—an element vetoed by the legal department. This episode, along with other documents and decisions invisible to the public, is part of what the artist calls “textual layers”: negotiations and frictions that constitute the work, even when absent from its final material form. Panorama exposes the invisible disputes of modern Brazilian art and resonates with Here-Elsewhere. Moving between memories, territories, and belongings, it asks: Who tells the history—and from where?
Emmanuel Nassar
Emmanuel Nassar develops his practice by exploring the language of painting and collage using everyday graphic elements such as commercial signs, banners, flags, and logos. His work engages with the visual language of Belém, capital of the state of Pará, and of the Amazon region, attentive to the materials, colors, and shapes used by riverside communities, market vendors, street sellers, locksmiths, boatmen, as well as those found in various celebrations and religious rites. A keen observer, Nassar produces objects, paintings, and installations as a form of recording and reinterpreting his surroundings, often employing compositional strategies from the history of modern art.
Bandeiras [Flags] (1998) is an installation made up of 123 official flags from municipalities in Pará. The work required a complex mobilization to gather all the flags; a quest driven by the artist’s interest in observing how Pará’s flags select and combine vivid colors as it uses coats of arms that blend Portuguese heraldry with elements of the Amazonian landscape—such as fish, trees, and rivers—revealing the layering of colonial and local histories.
The installation was first presented at MAM São Paulo in 1998. The flags, placed side by side and without labels, cover the walls of the gallery as a large mural. By removing the information identifying each municipality, Nassar shifts the focus from institutional representation to a visual experience of translation, imagination, and the capturing of a territory.
Hudinilson Júnior
Hudinilson Júnior’s work articulates body, image, and desire as vectors in a persistent investigation of self-portraiture and its political implications. Through collages, notebooks, performances, and photocopies, the artist constructed an intimate and insurgent visual vocabulary in which repetition, fragmentation, and duplication of the body become strategies for self-reinvention. By challenging the boundaries between public and private, visible and censored, his work acts as a form of subjective rebellion in times of repression—whether political or moral.
Narcisse/gesto I [Narcisse/Gesture I] (1984), featured in the exhibition Here-Elsewhere, revisits the myth of Narcissus not as a mirror of vanity but as a founding figure of the desire to see oneself—and, simultaneously, to disappear in the very act of seeing. Here, the self-portrait is friction: between the intimate and the political, between the body and its technical reproduction. The repeated gesture becomes a performative act in which identity is not fixed, but rather insinuated as a form in transit. Hudinilson proposes the image as a zone of errantry: a place where subjects lose themselves, reinvent themselves and disperse through the exaggerated magnification of their skin, pores, and hair.
Ivens Machado
Based in Rio de Janeiro since the 1960s, Ivens Machado began his career in the following decade with powerful participations in institutional exhibitions such as the 1973 São Paulo Biennial, where he presented a series of unsettling works—white bundles that evoked contorted bodies, fully bound by straitjackets. In the context of the state of exception maintained by the military dictatorship, this intervention could be read as a political allegory. However, within the broader scope of his entire artistic production, this same work appears as a precursor to a recurring interest in alluding to indeterminate bodily forms—associated with pain, threat, and the need for protection from society, as well as with the fleeting dynamics of desire.
Machado’s largest body of work consists of concrete sculptures, occasionally combined with other materials commonly found in Brazilian civil construction, such as rebar, shards of glass, and powdered tile pigment. The 1987 work presented in the exhibition is a representative piece from this group: composed of a central mass of exposed concrete, pigmented with a reddish tone in the area from which twisted rebar protrudes. Without adopting explicit figuration, the work evokes corporeal sensations and suggests analogies with raw emotional states. In Here-Elsewhere, the sculpture can be seen as a sign of what is untranslatable in the presence of self and other.
Judith Lauand
Judith Lauand was the only woman to join the Ruptura Group, which founded Concrete art in Brazil. Graduated from the Escola de Belas Artes de Araraquara [Araraquara School of Fine Arts], she moved to São Paulo in the early 1950s, where she worked as a monitor at the 2nd São Paulo Biennial and came to associate with artists such as Geraldo de Barros and Alexandre Wollner. Invited by Waldemar Cordeiro, she embraced Concretism in 1954, expanding the boundaries of Concrete art through a practice marked by formal rigor, experimentation, and political influences.
The 1965 work presented in Here-Elsewhere is a composition that synthesizes her precise geometric approach, in which planes of color, lines, and circular forms articulate in a delicate balance. The presence of the circle—a rare figure in Concrete orthodoxy—signals the freedom with which Lauand handled the movement’s codes, imparting dynamism and subjectivity to her compositions. In many works from this period, the artist creates rhythmic relations between figure and ground, exploring chromatic contrasts and subtle variations that provoke optical instability. Her trajectory, however, goes beyond Concretism: from the 1970s onward, Lauand began incorporating everyday objects into her canvases and addressing themes linked to repression, sexuality, and the role of women in Brazilian society, frequently returning to representation.
Megumi Yuasa
Megumi Yuasa began his artistic journey in the 1960s, starting with ceramic experiments in the countryside of Goiás. The son of Japanese immigrants, he developed a body of work marked by experimentation: he became familiar with the canons of traditional Japanese ceramics and subverted them by incorporating elements such as stone, metal, glass, and industrial paints into his pieces. His sculptures result from a crossing between technical rigor and spontaneity, between handcrafted practice and a critical attitude toward the traditions of ceramics and sculpture.
The exhibition Here-Elsewhere presents the work Semente [Seed] (1975). Composed of stone and ceramic, the piece suggests tensions between the organic and the constructed, between rootedness and displacement. Keeping in mind that the etymology of the word “diaspora” refers to the act of spreading or planting seeds, the image evoked by the work alludes both to origin and to the possibility of germination and transformation—themes that permeate not only Yuasa’s work but also his personal trajectory. In the context of the show, Semente dialogues with other works that investigate ideas of transit, memory, and belonging, composing a sensitive field where matter and trajectory intertwine.
Paulo Bruscky
Paulo Bruscky is one of the leading figures of Brazilian experimental art. Since the 1970s, he has produced at a daily pace—with paper, objects, photocopies, notebooks, photographs, and texts—works that cross visual poetry, mail art, performance, and urban actions. Having often used the phrase “Today, art is this communiqué,” Bruscky pursues a poetics that experiments with languages and circuits in order to circulate ideas, critiques, and inventions. In the work Distância [Distance], Bruscky uses typographic stamps to write the word “DISTÂNCIA,” fragmented at the two edges of the page. Between the two parts, the white space is at once a hiatus and a connective. Distance is not only the theme of the piece—it is also the structure of the work itself: it lies in the central absence, the occupied margins, and the displacement of the gaze. The visible graphic marks evoke institutional practices of registration and circulation, highlighting the artist’s interest in challenging the boundaries between art and archive, presence and absence, center and margin. In Here-Elsewhere, the work resonates as a metaphor for the physical, symbolic, and affective displacements that traverse subjects and territories: distance, here, does not separate—it inscribes a relational field made of intervals, traces, and frictions.
Lívio Abramo
In 1962, Lívio Abramo took part in the Brazilian Cultural Mission in Paraguay. The Mission aimed to promote cultural integration between the two countries and to help overcome the negative image of Brazil left by the Paraguayan War (1864-1870), which devastated the territory and killed a large portion of the Paraguayan population. The Cultural Mission was important both for diffusing Brazilian culture and for propagating modern art in Paraguay. Lívio Abramo settled in Paraguay and directed the Setor de Artes Plásticas e Visuais [Office for Fine and Visual Arts] until his death in 1992, playing a significant role in the development of printmaking and in the training of local artists. Additionally, he was one of the founders of the Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico do Paraguai [Paraguayan Historic and Artistic Heritage Institute] and produced a series of landscape prints that emphasized the geometric patterns of typical house facades. The pages of the notebook in which he wrote Arte Barroco de las antiguas misiones del Paraguay [Baroque Art from the Former Missions of Paraguay], in both Spanish and Portuguese, refer to the Jesuit missions of Paraguay—a period during which European Baroque and Guarani culture combined to create an artistic expression known as Hispanic-Guarani Baroque, revealing the inventiveness of Indigenous peoples. Lívio Abramo forged deep connections with Paraguayan culture and produced a body of ceramic works featuring graphic motifs and symbolic references related to the Guarani worldview.
Lothar Charoux
Lothar Charoux arrived in Brazil in 1928, fleeing political instability in Europe. He studied at the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios de São Paulo [School of Arts and Crafts of São Paulo], where his teacher was Waldemar da Costa, and became close to artists such as Maria Leontina and Marcello Grassmann. After an initial figurative phase, he embraced geometric abstraction and, in 1952, turned into one of the signatories of the Ruptura Manifesto. In 1963, together with Hermelindo Fiaminghi and Luiz Sacilotto, he co-founded the Associação de Artes Visuais Novas Tendências [New Trends Visual Arts Association] (NT).
For more than three decades, he balanced his artistic production with his work as a buyer at a thread factory. Critics at the time observed that his daily contact with this material directly influenced his work: his rigorous research on point, line, and plane echoed the rhythms, repetitions, and weaves of the textile world—a sensitive geometry, made of precision and vibration. Charoux developed a visual vocabulary in which the geometric line is not fixed but reverberates—opening space for what is sensitive and relational. In Here-Elsewhere, his work appears as a trace: not a static vestige, but a vibrant line proposing ongoing relations between time, matter, and perception.
Lourival Cuquinha
Lourival Cuquinha carried out a project involving one hundred immigrants who arrived in São Paulo from various African and Latin American countries. All of them worked as street vendors and were approached while conducting their activities in the streets. The artist bought products from each of the chosen immigrants and took photos of them both front and back. These workers—generally treated as second-class citizens, undervalued, and nearly invisible—gain visibility by having their portraits printed onto copper plates. The merchandise purchased holds a market value equivalent to that of the plate bearing the vendor’s portrait. It is as if the subject’s identity were bonded to the metal. The plate, attached to the wall with a hinge, is completed by the acquired object and a hanger made of Brazilian five-cent copper coins. In addition to affirming the identity of immigrant workers, the artist draws attention to migratory flows and to the diversity of cultures and objects that accompany each individual in their displacement.
Maureen Bisilliat
Maureen Bisilliat was born in the United Kingdom and, as the daughter of an Argentine diplomat, lived in various countries. Through a life marked by constant movement, she had the opportunity to study and experience the cultural diversity of Europe and the Americas. The artist dedicated herself to photojournalism from the 1960s onward, shifting from painting to photography while working at the influential magazine Realidade. Through her “foreign” gaze, she found in Brazilian subjects—such as women who catch crabs— cultural references that helped shape her own identity. She researched seminal works by Brazilian writers and sought an intimate relationship between literature and photography. The series As caranguejeiras [The Female Crab Hunters] (1968) was published in 1984 as a book, accompanied by the poem O cão sem plumas [The Featherless Dog] by João Cabral de Melo Neto. In the photo essay, just as in the poem, the landscape, the mud, and the female bodies blend together as if they were indivisible. Poetry and photography meet in such a way that, rather than one translating the other, they become fully equivalent. The intimacy between the artist and the women she photographed reveals that cultural or geographical distances can dissolve.
León Ferrari
Displacement is a central element in León Ferrari’s trajectory: born in Argentina, he was self-taught and spent a few years in Italy during the 1950s, working mainly with sculpture. After returning to his home country, he faced political persecution that ultimately led him to flee with his family in 1976, when a military dictatorship was established. Ferrari settled in São Paulo, where he remained for nearly fifteen years and, in the last years of his exile, he produced a set of heliographs, featured in this exhibition. Heliography is a reproduction technique long used by architects to create exact copies of blueprints or technical drawings. Ferrari’s works allude to urban organization and social discipline through standardization and tireless repetition of compositional elements. In these images, he diagrams streets, walkways, lines, beds, and tables in floorplan-like arrangements that reflect the dynamics of city life, whether in Latin America or elsewhere. In doing so, he highlights how contemporary societies normalize crowds and patterns of behavior and coexistence, suppressing individuality and freedom of movement.
Lydia Okumura
The perception and experience of space are central to Lydia Okumura’s work, who explores the relationships between form, color, materiality, and light. Employing geometric abstraction, Okumura—a Brazilian artist of Japanese descent who has lived in New York since the mid-1970s—investigates the possibilities of matter as it is subjected to perception and to the human body, navigating in the passage between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, between drawing and volume, between image and space. In the work featured in the exhibition, the artist constructed a cube by manipulating a steel mesh which, with its noisy translucency, consolidates a suspended presence in the room, hanging from the ceiling by a wire. The steel mesh gives the cube a body, materially inserting it into the space; at the same time, it allows light and gaze to pass through while seemingly trapping them within, contracting them into a domain of their own, diffusely separated from its concrete surroundings. It is as if the symbolic contradiction between the rigidity and permeability of the material were an extension of the subject’s own experience and perception when facing the artwork.
Madalena Schwartz
Madalena Schwartz’s life was shaped by flight—from the rise of fascism and antisemitism—and by fresh starts in new lands, with new languages and people. Born in Bulgaria, she spent her teenage years and early adulthood as an immigrant in Buenos Aires, living with her father. In 1960, she settled in São Paulo with her husband and children. It was here, during the darkest years of the military dictatorship, that Schwartz discovered photography. The portraits she took in the 1970s of women, travesti people and crossdressers—including the Dzi Croquettes set and the other photographs shown in the exhibition—explore another kind of displacement and border-crossing: one less tied to ethnic identities or family and geography, and more related to the discovery of new ways of being and feeling. Though the life paths of these figures from São Paulo’s downtown nightlife were entirely different from Schwartz’s own, her interest in and treatment of their bodies reveal a gaze that is sensitive, empathetic, and almost admiring of the aesthetic and existential freedom they enjoy.
Nazareth Pacheco
Investigating and understanding pain through someone else’s physical limits is not exactly possible. In her work, however, Nazareth Pacheco reflects a lifetime of pain, stemming from her congenital malformations and the surgical procedures performed to correct them for aesthetic purposes. The pieces presented in the exhibition are part of a series of objects created in the late 1990s, resembling items of women’s clothing: a dress and a necklace. These items, however, cannot be worn, as they are made of sharp elements such as razor blades and fishhooks, combined with crystals and dark beads. The apparent beauty of these objects is not deceptive—it is intentionally constructed to make visible the artist’s intimate and autobiographical dilemma: it is not possible to alter her body in an attempt to overcome its limitations without experiencing pain. Perceiving in these objects a paradox between beauty and suffering does not require prior knowledge of the artist’s life story; it only requires remembering those moments when existing in our own bodies didn’t seem like enough—even though it’s the only way we can be alive.
Rafael França
In a brief but intense trajectory, Rafael França developed a radical practice marked by experimentation with printmaking, photography, xerox, installation, and especially video. In São Paulo, he graduated from the Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo [School of Communications and Arts at the University of São Paulo] (ECA-USP) with Regina Silveira as his advisor, and he was part of 3NÓS3 alongside Hudinilson Júnior and Mario Ramiro—a group responsible for incisive urban interventions. As of 1982, already in the U.S., he delved into video and moving image languages, creating works with fragmented narratives, desynchronized sounds, and unstable images—often blurred or out of focus—that challenged the boundaries between autobiographical document.
The exhibition Here-Elsewhere features 1982 works from the MAM São Paulo collection, created in drypoint on mirror paper. This choice of medium is deliberate: the mirror paper reflects its surroundings but blurs the contours of anyone who tries to see themselves in it. As in other works by França, reflection and blur combine into a figure that never stabilizes—there is a displacement between seeing, recording, and recognizing oneself. This operation gains power in the context of the show, which investigates errantry, traces, and marks left by the passage of bodies, images, and memories.
Sara Ramo
Sara Ramo’s video can be understood as an ocean crossing in a rowboat, yet the artist does not physically move from her place. It is as if she is neither here nor elsewhere; or rather, as if she is both at the point of departure and arrival simultaneously, since it is one and the same place. The displacement of this Hispanic American artist, who lives and works between Madrid and Belo Horizonte, happens symbolically. Unlike ships that cross the seas carrying products, colonizing, or exploiting other peoples, the artist approaches the journey broadly, without a direct destination or clear goal. In a world that has undergone an intense process of cultural and economic integration known as globalization, her work points to isolation, to the difficulty of encountering others, and to the idea that we still live in isolation. The video evokes an experience in which navigating is a reunion with oneself—a journey in which one does not seek to reach solid ground, to dock some place else, or to create connections, but to recognize oneself as a subject in permanent transit and transformation.
Créditos
Leon Ferrari
León Ferrari, Gente, 1983-2007. Coleção MAM São Paulo. Foto: Romulo Fialdini
Anna Bella Geiger
Anna Bella Geiger, Brasil-1500,1996, 1996. Coleção Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo. Foto: Romulo Fialdini.
Megumi Yuasa
Megumi Yuasa, Semente, 1975. Coleção MAM São Paulo. Foto: Romulo Fialdini.