Inverno Dentro do Bosque

Luciana Brito Galeria presents Inverno Dentro do Bosque [Winter in the Grove], a group exhibition curated by Fernando Mota. Continuing the Tetralogia das Estações – a cycle of four exhibitions held every four years between 2022 and 2034 – this show follows Fauna, Flora e Primavera (2022) and takes as its point of departure two Japanese short stories: “Rashōmon” (1915) and “In a Grove” (1922), by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. Moving through shadows, ambiguities, and multiple versions of truth, Akutagawa’s narratives provide the framework for this meditation on winter.

Artists: Afonso Tostes, Caio Reisewitz, Eder Santos, Fernando Zarif, Liliana Porter, Junia Penido, Marina Abramovic, Marina Woisky, Mika Takahashi, Paula Garcia, Regina Silveira, Selva de Carvalho, Raphael Zarka, Sofia Borges, Thiago Honório, Thomaz Farkas, Tobias Putrih, Wagner Malta Tavares.

Inverno dentro do bosque

“When one tries to resolve an insoluble question, there is no time to choose the means.”

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa – Rashōmon

“Afterward, everything was silent… No, I could still hear someone crying. Freeing myself from the rope, I strained my ears. But no – it was I myself who was crying…”

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa – In a Grove

In 1950, Japanese director Akira Kurosawa brought to the screen two short stories by his compatriot Ryūnosuke Akutagawa: “Rashōmon” (1915) and “In a Grove” (1922). The first deals with the decline of a society and its customs, questioning the ambivalence and cynicism of human nature when faced with moral and existential dilemmas. The second centers on the impossibility of judgment and absolute truth in a situation marked by conflicting eyewitness accounts of the same event. While the first story unfolds among the ruins of Kyoto’s old city gate, the second takes place in a grove on the city’s outskirts. In his award-winning film, Kurosawa borrowed the title, setting, and part of the moral debate of “Rashōmon” in order to develop the original narrative structure of “In a Grove” and convey the story’s essence: the contradictions between different narrators recounting a specific event. Perceptions, individual interpretations, and manipulated accounts of a crime collide. This way of telling the same story through incompatible viewpoints and descriptions, in which narrative subjectivity prevails over the factual objectivity of a given event, became known as the “Rashōmon Effect.”

The exhibition Inverno Dentro do Bosque [Winter in the Grove] was born from a desire to experiment with exhibition design and narrative, taking these two Japanese short stories as its starting point. Kurosawa found a method within the language of cinema, but what would a version in the visual arts look like? How could this literary technique be adapted and used within an exhibition? Here, in a departure from the usual logic of contemporary art, content serves form, and structure takes precedence over concept. Space is therefore essential. In its architecture, Luciana Brito Galeria offers an interplay of mirrors and doubled routes that support and amplify the exhibition’s central aim: to give visitors different paths through which to interpret the story as they see fit. To reinforce this vital feature of the exhibition, pairs of similar works were selected, so that at various points along the route the visitor experiences a strange and deceptive sense of repetition. From beginning to end, and back to the beginning again, each work is placed within the gallery to stand in counterpoint to another, strengthening one of the exhibition’s routes and narratives. Nothing is random: the whole exhibition takes shape through an exhibition design allied with the architecture of the house and its annexes. Moving along the exhibition’s different routes, we repeatedly encounter the human body, or fragments of it, alongside shadows, objects, and other beings that announce a presence and a certain mystery: something has happened, or else is about to happen. The symbolism follows the same nebulous direction, weaving in echoes of the original stories alongside motifs from the works themselves: solitary chairs before the fireplace, cocoons in the gardens, eyes watching us in the passageways, boats pointing in opposite directions, abandoned gates and closed padlocks, horses in motion, flies, masks, enigmatic women, unidentified silhouettes, dense vegetation… These are traces of past scenes, signs of an incomplete, wintry story. We witness alternatives of the same script as it changes through detours, through details, through disagreements between images, and through divergences in the way the evidence is revealed within the exhibition space. How do we behave in the terrain of uncertainty, in the absence of confirmation? How much can we believe our memories, vague recollections, or reports from third parties? Which part of the story did we actually see, which part did we hear, and which part do we not even know exists? Doubting others is always the easiest path. Yet when we have only one side of the facts, full of gaps and imprecise contours, are we capable of recognizing the fragility of our own truth?

The choice of theme also stems from a desire to address something that, like literature, has appeared frequently in my exhibition curating: the intrinsic ambiguity of human beings, along with the incongruity we carry and the paradoxes we face – or choose to hide – in our lives.

Within the broader context of the Tetralogia das Estações, a twelve-year cycle of exhibitions themed successively around the four seasons, a few features and decisions are worth noting. Bringing the somber atmosphere of these stories into the house required the exhibition to take place in a colder, quieter season, better suited to reflection. The works selected and the way they are placed in the space likewise suggest a mood of introspection and observation: a slower, more attentive reading; a more rational and less intuitive installation. This contrasts with the expansive, sensory, and inviting aesthetic of the preceding exhibition, Fauna, Flora e Primavera (2022). Lightness and free composition give way to the discipline and effort of a carefully calculated presentation. Whereas in Primavera the works and exhibition design encouraged an encounter between human beings and nature, inviting a realignment of that relationship through discovery and reassessment, Inverno turns inward. Here, the misalignment is internal: the search is for a reunion of the human being with itself, and for the possibility of a new vision beginning from within. In Primavera, we contemplated the many forms of life. In Inverno, we reflect on our many deaths.

Tetralogia das Estações

Inverno Dentro do Bosque is the second exhibition in the Tetralogia das Estações, a project conceived by Fernando Mota and developed in partnership with Luciana Brito Galeria. Begun in 2022 and scheduled to conclude in 2034, the project presents a new exhibition every four years, each one based on a season of the year and a literary work. In all, counting the exhibition periods and research intervals, the initiative spans twelve years – something unprecedented for a curatorial project within Brazil’s gallery circuit. Its aim is to experiment with the same exhibition space under different conditions, taking into account its natural variations in light, humidity, and temperature, as well as the seasonal cycles of urban life, alongside the unfolding of a long-term research project on sociocultural themes guided essentially by literature. In each exhibition, the central gardens of the modernist residence will be occupied by artist Selva de Carvalho with commissioned works, offering the rare opportunity to observe how an artist explores the same site four times over more than a decade, in dialogue with the curatorial project. By allowing the evolution of an artist’s production, a curator’s research, and a gallery’s work to be followed side by side over time, the project brings into focus four central values of the curatorial proposal: the importance of collaboration, the strength of planning, the value of construction, and the virtue of patience in our time.

Author’s Note:

I must include the following quotations by Tatiana Gonçales, which clearly and directly summarize my own words without any loss of poetic force.

“Every act of looking implies a choice and, consequently, a particular way of constructing reality (…) More than offering answers, the exhibition inhabits the fertile territory of doubt and imagination, where multiple narratives coexist and every truth yields to possibility.” – Tatiana Gonçales 

“This partnership between artist, curator, and gallery affirms a shared aim: the construction of  knowledge through time, shared experimentation, and conceptual evolution.” – Tatiana Gonçales