Kehinde Territory

Watch the full videos of the lectures on our YouTube channel.

Kehinde Territory

Since its release in 2008, Ana Maria Gonçalves' novel "Um Defeito de Cor" (A Color Defect) has been a landmark in contemporary Brazilian literature. But it goes beyond that. It establishes itself as a landmark because it reveals a continuing legacy of colonization and the election of subjection and the right of ownership of humans over humans. It is a landmark because it establishes links to a memory long believed lost, resurfacing like a necessary flash of lightning in the gap in a record of where we come from and where our roots stem from. Enslavement in Brazil cannot be relegated to the experience of the past. Rather, it is an element that permeates our ways of thinking and existing in an asymmetrical and often dehumanizing society. However, the work draws, inscribes, and tears open spaces to see Black existence in 19th-century Brazil. There are black people there who read and create learning strategies, there is the urban center taken over by men and women who move around and negotiate their freedoms and imprisonments, there is life in Bahia, Maranhão, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo.

Above all, there is a woman who ignites her own life, ascends, and goes by the name of Kehinde. The character travels from Savannah to Brazil, from the Brazils to Africa and Europe. She invents ways of life, eyes to see and be seen, dies a few times, lives many, learns and teaches. Kehinde is the Black woman with her tactics of existence: cunning, attentiveness, an eye attentive to affection not far from struggle and knowledge.

It's the ability to create territories with each arrival. In an exhibition in the Global South, like the 12th Biennial, which takes as its starting and finishing points the feminine and art in their tensions and possibilities of invention, taking the figure of a character who stands between life and fiction—between memory and the writing of necessary pasts and the mark of the Black woman—goes beyond a tribute. It means establishing that the Black woman has the power, in different senses, to be the image of a world already lived and a desired one.

Kehinde Territory is part of an educational project that takes this Black woman and her life creations as the point from which the encounter begins. Kehinde Territory is a place for women and, sometimes, for men as well. During the 12th Biennial, Kehinde Territory will be everything that is based on arriving, meeting, and learning together. Kehinde Territory is a conversation circle. Territories that open up in different cities, always with guests, their knowledge, and their possibilities for building their territories and forms of learning there. Kehinde is displacement. A displacement of knowledge, perspectives, certainties, and constructions of the common, of the order of what is shared. Kehinde is the image and the arrow of the encounters that take place throughout 2019 and 2020. Displacement, knowledge, and invention are words that sustain the territories that arise from the voices of our guests.

Igor Simões

Assistant Curator of the 12th Biennial/Educational Curatorship

Educational Program - Kehinde Territory

October/November 2019

Porto Alegre, Caxias do Sul and Pelotas

Porto Alegre, October 8th at CHC Santa Casa

7pm - Feminine and the curatorial thinking of the 12th Biennial

With Andrea Giunta and Fabiana Lopes

8:00 PM - Educational, Exhibitions and Teaching in Visual Arts: Places of Creation

With Carmen Capra, Luciana Loponte and Celina Alcântara

Porto Alegre, October 31st at CHC Santa Casa

10am - Art Institutions and Education

With Monica Hoff, Carla Batista and Marga Kremer

2:00 pm - Mediations and mediators, teachers

With Monica Hoff, Carol Mendoza and Larissa Fauri

5:00 PM - The classroom as a space for creation and sabotage

With Carmen Capra and Estêvão da Fontoura

Caxias do Sul, November 6th at Sesc Caxias do Sul

7pm - Race and Visual Arts in Terra Brasil

With Xadalu and Renata Sampaio

Pelotas, November 7th at the Pelotas Public Library

7pm - Territory of Black Women and Art

With Izis Abreu and Dedy Ricardo

Porto Alegre, November 12th at CHC Santa Casa

10am - Arts, Feminine and Contemporary Thoughts

With Daniela Kern, Élle de Bernardini and Mitti Mendonça

2:00 PM - Feminine and Culture

With Winnie Bueno, Joanna Burigo and Fernanda Bastos

12/11/2019 – 10am/4pm – Porto Alegre - CHC Santa Casa

Porto Alegre, November 12th at the CEEE Cultural Center - Erico Verissimo

5:00 PM - Kehinde Territories

Ana Maria Gonçalves

Participation: Izis Abreu and Dedy Ricardo

Synopsis Tables Kehinde Territory

The feminine and the curatorial thinking of the Biennale 12

With the presence of general curator Andrea Giunta and curators Fabiana Lopes and Igor Simões, the panel will open a first conversation with the public about the Bienal 12

Educational, Exhibitions and Teaching in Art: Places of Creation

Educational spaces, art, classrooms, creation. Exchanges are essential, and their relationship occurs (or should) in constant affinity with exhibitions, showrooms, theaters, and classrooms. The relationships between these spaces of knowledge construction from the perspective of creation are the direction of this encounter formed by academically active teachers who inscribe their educational and poetic perspectives.

Art institutions and educational institutions:

The educational aspects of visual arts institutions have become a powerhouse of knowledge and spaces that allow institutions to reflect on themselves. However, how does this listening and speaking occur? What is the role of education in the creation of institutional design?

Mediations and mediators, teachers

Being between, being with, being from and despite. Seeing together and moving. Teachers and mediators meet in the places where exhibitions and classrooms speak. The exhibition space and beyond are a zone of proximity and distance between these two agents. How do these relationships unfold? What does each have to say to the other? So, how can we create forms of cooperation between art teaching and mediation in exhibition spaces?

Classroom as a space for creation and sabotage

If the classroom is the place where artistic knowledge is woven together, it is also the space that can sabotage what has been established. How do art and education intersect, or can they intersect, in the practice of visual arts teaching? Is the art classroom a place for affirming or questioning art as a territory?

Race and Visual Arts in Terra Brasil

It's impossible to think about visual arts and their intersections without considering who is involved in them and who still calls for visibility. Indigenous people, Black people, or the various intersections between these places and gender, class, and art. The panel aims to discuss and hear some premises for the necessary confrontation.

Territory of Black Women and Art

Black women are still a minority in collections, in art exhibitions in general, and in the repertoire that occupies exhibition halls and classrooms. Reflecting on these impediments and their forms of implosion is the beginning of a change already on the horizon. Reflecting, debating, and finding solutions that foster new sensitivities to the issue is the guiding principle of this meeting.

Arts, Feminine and Contemporary Thoughts

If the theme that challenges us is femininity and art, we must ask ourselves what the current state of affairs is, what the paths are, and what the keys are for establishing this arena. It is imperative that we listen and be in a state of partnership in establishing this broad terrain of disputes and in the path of building solidary forms of existence. Where should we consider this relationship?

Feminine and Culture

Other words, other intersections, other calls. The living, pulsating, and combative forms of femininity and its inventions of cultures and new epistemologies are the direction of this meeting. Feminism and some of its most important propositions will be the thread that guides this meeting.

Kehinde Territories

Writer Ana Maria Gonçalves and her essential book "Um Defeito de Cor" (A Flaw in Color) are the name and the inspiration for encounters between many women and some men in our Kehinde territory. On this occasion, with the author's presence, excerpts from the book and discussions will be simultaneously part of the Biennial and the Book Fair. Ana Maria Gonçalves, her words, and her Kehinde will be present in this gathering of affection and homage to a work that inscribed new interpretations of Women, Races, and Brazils.

Watch the full videos of the lectures on our YouTube channel.

Sponsorship: Santander

Co-sponsorship: Banrisul

Support: Unimed and Unicred

Institutional support: State Secretariat of Culture of Rio Grande do Sul, Memorial do RS, MARGS, UERGS, CHC Santa Casa, Iberê Camargo Foundation and Theatro São Pedro

Implementation of the educational program: Fecomércio / SESC RS

Realization: Federal Law of Incentive to Culture and Mercosur Visual Arts Biennial Foundation