Carlota Guerrero

Carlota Guerrero, Arca for PAPER Magazine

Carlota Guerrero is a photographer and art director based in Barcelona who works on personal and commissioned projects. She is known for work that often combines photography or filmmaking with her own art direction and choreography. Her first major commission was collaborating with the singer-songwriter Solange on the artwork and art direction of the videos for the singer’s acclaimed “A Seat at the Table” album. This collaborative work continued when she teamed up with the poet Rupi Kaur to art direct a live performance of Kaur’s poems in New York. Carlota’s unique blend of feminism, nature and performance creates work that is both subversive and ethereal. She has collaborated with global brands such as Nike, Givenchy, Dior and regularly contributes to titles such as Vogue Spain, Numero, Porter, and Fader. She lives in Barcelona.

Zandile Tshabalala

Zandile Tshabalala, Thinking bout’ you, 2019

Zandile Tshabalala is an emerging South African visual artist born in Soweto. Her chosen media are acrylic and oil paint and at times, she infuses the two with sculptural elements on her canvas works. Tshabalala tends to revisit and refer to the works of painters who came before her and interpret their artwork in the way she sees fit for her narrative.

To name a few artists, the works of Kerry James Marshall, Kehinde Wiley, Titus Kaphar, Njideka Akunyili-Crosby and Henri Rousseau have influenced the artist’s way of working through her paintings. In her work, Tshabalala is interested in topics of representation, particularly the marginalized representation of black women in historical painting.  The artist felt a strong need to challenge this marginalization and to give back the black woman’s voice in her paintings by placing the black female figure in a powerful position that allows her to be in control of her own body and the gaze that is exchanged between her and the viewer.

Arielle Bobb-Willis

Arielle Bobb Willis, Billie Eilish photographed for The New York Times Magazine, Issue 15 March 2020

Born in New York City, with pit stops in South Carolina and New Orleans, photographer Arielle Bobb-Willis has been using the camera for nearly a decade. Battling with depression from an early age, Bobb-Willis developed a visual language that speaks to the complexities of life: the beautiful, the strange, belonging, isolation, and connection, found solace behind the lens. Inspired by artists as Jacob Lawrence and Benny Andrews, Bobb-Willis applies a ‘painterly’ touch to her photography by documenting people in compromising positions as way to highlight these complexities. Her photographs are all captured in urban and rural cities, from the South to North, East to West. Between fashion and contemporary art, her use of bright colors is therapeutic and speaks to a desire to claim power and joy in moments of sadness, confusion or confinement. Arielle is currently based in New York City.

Vivian Caccuri

Vivian Caccuri proposes the realization of the Caminhada Silenciosa (Silent Walk) in Venice, an experience of urban drift, which allows an eight-hour conviviality between twenty people who do not know each other. An itinerary/performance, previously performed in Rio de Janeiro, that the artist transposes to Italy, bringing together places with intense sound activity, constructions that embrace contrasting sounds, building terraces, underground paths, isolated neighborhoods and religious spaces. The experimentation embraces the possibilities of similarity between “place” and “person”, acoustic behavior and personality, listening and swimming. This walk investigates different densities of human occupation in Venice. Noting that the city offers alternative routes that are used more often by residents, I propose a route that overlap areas of great concentration of tourists to the small alleys and lanes where circulation is rare. In this way, the sound sensation becomes rhythmic under the presence and absence of tourism, causing different states of alertness, relaxation and contemplation in the participants. The contrasts between exposure and privacy, leisure and retreat, will be invoked all the way.

On the Google Maps platform I was able to make the drawing and the instructions on where we should go and what we would do in each of these locations. The route I propose is 6.8 km long, with 8 hours of duration. At this intensity, it is possible to choose places to stop where the group can rest or simply remain idle for a few minutes. In these breaks I usually do sound performances with portable sound equipment, or organize collaborations with artists, dancers or musicians participating in the walk. Despite the design of the route, once I do the research in the city, the new perceptions lead me to vary and adapt the initial script. The route also crosses several private properties with which I also try to establish a dialogue in order to obtain permission for our visit. I had already done a few dozen silent walks in Rio de Janeiro and in some cities abroad, but this one in Venice was different.

Berna Reale

Berna Reale, sobremesa # 4, 2018, Courtesy of Berna Reale and Galeria Nara Roesler

Berna Reale is one of Brazil’s most important contemporary artists. She is mostly known for her performance based work, which she has been developing since the 1990s. She first received public attention in 2006 at the 25th Art Salon of Pará, following her presentation of Cerne.The work consists of a photographic intervention carried out at the meat market located in Ver-o-Peso, a traditional center for street markets and stands bustling with tourists and local shoppers in Belém, Brazil.

Since then, the artist has been exploring and developing the idea of using her own body as the central aesthetic element of her images and performances, through which she aims to denounce social problems and injustices. Her work critically engages with the theme of violence, exploring its symbolic and physical representations, and the inevitable shadow of censorship, as a means of revealing the importance of image-making when it comes to maintaining freedom of thought. The strength of Berna Reale’s imagery lies in eliciting a desire to get closer, countered by a sense of repulsion – an ambivalence reminiscent of the irony in Brazilian society’s fascination for and disgust of violence. Importantly, Berna Reale’s work has come to heavily depend on photography as a tool for not only registering, but also perpetuating and disseminating her actions once the performance is over.

Berna Reale was born in 1965 in Belém do Pará, Brazil, where she lives and works. Recent solo shows include: While You Laugh, at Galeria Nara Roesler (2019), in New York, USA; Festa, at Viaduto das Artes (2019), in Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Deformation, at Bergkirche (2017), and Berna Reale – Über uns / About Us, at Kunsthaus (2017), both in Wiesbaden, Germany; Berna Reale: Singing in the Rain, at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMoCA) (2016), in Salt Lake City, USA; Vazio de nós, at Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR) (2013), in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Recent group shows include: 3rd Beijing Photo Biennial, China (2018); 56th Venice Biennale, Italy (2015); Brasile. Il coltello nella carne, at Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea Milano (PAC-Milano) (2018), in Milan, Italy; Video Art in Latin America, II Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA (II PST: LA/LA), at LAXART (2017), in Hollywood, USA; Artistas comprometidos? Talvez, at Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (FCG) (2014), in Lisbon, Portugal. Her works are included in important institutional collections, such as: Instituto Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil; Kunsthaus Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden, Germany; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM-SP), São Paulo, Brazil; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM Rio), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and JW Collection, Atlanta, USA.