Audio Stop 955

NARRATOR:
Brazilian artist Sidney Amaral’s self-portrait is inspired by an image of an iron collar that some enslaved persons were forced to wear. Similar devices are depicted in objects displayed nearby.

Amaral places himself in the collar, changing the historical torture device into a modern one with a ring of microphones. Hélio Menezes was a co-curator of this exhibition at its first venue at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo in Brazil.

HELIO MENEZES:
So when Sidney Amaral paints himself in a profile position, refusing to speak and with a very serious face, he brings different temporalities to the same composition.  One can see and imagine the continuities but also the discontinuities between times of slavery and contemporary situation of the Brazilian population in Brazil.  So this self-portrait is also a kind of a group portrait, because at the same time as he places himself as an individual, he is taking himself as a symbol of continuities of time between 19th century and nowadays.  

NARRATOR:
Brazilian society still bears many of the scars of slavery and Amaral felt a responsibility to address them. He did so here by using a watercolor technique used by Europeans who visited Brazil in the 19th century to paint idyllic landscapes. European artists of the era also made images of Black people in profile, showing them as scientific types rather than as individuals.

HELIO MENEZES:
So he is taking the technique used on that time and coming to nowadays, putting his own head as a symbol of himself and of a historical group.

I think many pieces are connected by a common visual culture that goes through the Black Atlantic at different times and geographies, and sometimes one can see the same symbol in a Brazilian painting of 21st century and find it in an engraving from 19th century, sometimes with specific connections but other times not directly related.