São Paulo Art Biennial

Abraham Palatnik’s first Aparelho cinecromático (1949) was initially rejected by the selection committee on the grounds that it did not fit any of the established categories, though the work was later accepted and awarded an honorable mention by the international jury.

Having established itself as an important event in international art world, the Bienal's 3rd edition featured the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

The abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock, who died the year before, was honoured with a special room organized by the American delegation, which marked the height of his international renown.

200,000 visitors ensured the success of this exhibition, whose highlights included a selection of thirty works by the impressionist icon, Vincent van Gogh, and a strong showing of Tachism and Informal Art.

At the awards ceremony, artists Maria Bonomi and Sérgio Camargo deliver a motion for the repeal of the preventive arrests of Mário Schenberg, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Florestan Fernandes and Cruz Costa to the President Castelo Branco.

Months after Institutional Act n. 5 (AI-5) came into force, effectively annulling personal freedoms, eighty percent of the artists invited to exhibition refused, in protest, to participate.

The Brazilian Representation was made up of 100 artists selected through regional juries (Fortaleza, Salvador, Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Curitiba).

For the first time in its history, the Grand Prize "Itamaraty" was awarded to a Latin American artist, the Argentine Grupo CAYC of the Centro de Arte y Comunicación in Buenos Aires.

The critic and former Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC-USP), Walter Zanini, was the first to fill the position, in an edition which abolished separate spaces for each country and chose to group the works according to "analogy of language" (techniques and themes).

It even included a room with documentation on the group – records of Ben Vautier sleeping, Dick Higgins playing the piano, and Wolf Vostell during an action in New York.

The historical segment takes on a major importance in this edition, whose theme, “Rupture as Support,” made it possible to explore platforms and poetics observed in the works of Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel.

The concept, extracted from the roots of Brazilian culture, permeated the work of all 76 curators involved in the exhibition, as well as was the result of powerful solo shows dedicated to each of the 53 National Representations.

Austrian group Monochrom, who were running the neighbouring pavilion, invited other artists to donate letters from their own country titles in order to recreate the word "Taiwan".

Rethinking the purpose and direction of the exhibition, the 28th Bienal – “In Living Contact” carried out a radical proposal by keeping the second floor of the pavilion completely empty, as an Open Plan – a metaphor for the conceptual crisis experienced by traditional biennial systems faced by the institutions that organize them.

Driven by a new impetus promoted by a new board of directors committed to the renewal of the institution, the Bienal inaugurated its 29th edition with a permanent educational project and a broad parallel program.

Favoring politically oriented works, the curatorship of Agnaldo Farias and Moacir dos Anjos held nearly 400 activities in the six conceptual spaces entitled Terreiros, and made its theme a verse by Jorge de Lima: “There is always a cup of sea to sail in”.

Bandeira branca (2010), by Nuno Ramos, stirred controversy due to its live vultures flying in the central span of the pavilion accompanied by a montage of sounds from the national popular tradition.

Titled “The Imminence of Poetics”, this edition of the Bienal adopted the constellation as a metaphor and established discursive interconnections between past and present; center and periphery; object and language.

The works of this edition – entitled “How to (…) things that don’t exist” – were designed within the concept of "project," many carried out in collaboration between two or more individuals – artists and professionals from other disciplines, such as teachers, sociologists, architects or writers.

The curators traveled to four cities to bring forth Study Days (Accra, in Ghana, Lamas, in Peru, Santiago, in Chile, and Cuiabá, in Brazil), and also held a last meeting in São Paulo.

Conceived as an artwork by Jorge Menna Barreto, the exhibition's restaurant unfolds notions regarding the relationships between human eating habits and the environment, landscape, climate and life on Earth.

The 2023 São Paulo Bienal – titled "Choreographies of the Impossible" – sought to address and question activism, repressed cultures, and the art history of South America.

The upcoming 2025 São Paulo Biennial, titled "Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice", is set to extend the traditionally month-long event by an additional 4 weeks.