Ideias Radicais Sobre o Amor: Museu de Arte do Rio, RJ

Would you like some tea? A cookie? Have you read your fortune today?

 

Panmela Castro, from Rio de Janeiro, presents a playful, relational and intimate experience at MAR in a white cube with retro-futuristic and cyberpunk references. Here, the public is invited to walk through and experience her transdisciplinary, enigmatic and polysemic work transmuted into paintings, videos, photographs, sculptures, participatory installations, games and live performances.

 

In her twenty-year career, Panmela has been known for her artistic and activist work, in which she does not separate art and life, developing propositions based on practices of welcoming and listening. Thus, her aesthetic objects are the result of performative actions materializing important issues such as the (im)possibility of affective bonds, social empowerment, the transgression of stereotypes, loneliness, gender violence, platonic love and self-love. These and more themes, addressed with frankness, irony and a certain humor, permeate the production of the artist whose practices are also pedagogical and radical, and comprise poetic gestures and care as micro-political acts.

 

The exhibition is based on a multiple temporal dynamic and opens incomplete, with part of the works produced and exhibited throughout the season. As the protagonist of her narrative, Panmela shares sincere emotions with the public in instagrammable situations or intimate moments in her studio. In various propositions, she shares the protagonist role with other people, be they close to her, someone with a remarkable life story or even strangers who activate a work by becoming part of it.

 

A program of ritual performances completes the exhibition room. Panmela Castro evokes a syncretic ritualistic modus that blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, acting in the world in powerful, sensitive artistic processes. The artist's various personas always have something to tell us and to listen to. Now, come in and make yourself at home: the exhibition is an invitation to reinvent yourself. After all, what is love when there is no reinvention?