SAO PAULO – COPAN - PRESENTATION  TAMAR GUIMARÃES

Tamar Guimarães in conversation with Angelique Campens

 

Monday  October 5, 2009 at 6 pm

 At edificio Copan (Capacete)

 

Tamar Guimarães in conversation with Angelique Campens about the work 'Dura Lex Sed Lex, no cabelo so Gumex'. Dura Lex Sed Lex, no cabelo so Gumex' is Latin and Portuguese for 'the law is hard but it is the law, and on the hair only Gumex’ and was a 1960s Brazilian advertising slogan and jingle for Gumex, a beauty product for ultimate hair greasing.

'A month ago I went to Dresden to meet the supreme judge of the Dresden High Court of Appeals. He had agreed to read from the memoirs of one of his predecessors, Daniel Paul Schreber, under a state of hypnosis. Schreber, his predecessor, suffered from a mental breakdown shortly after he had been appointed to his position as Senatspräsident in 1893 and in his memoirs he describes the onset of his breakdown with the words: ‘Furthermore, one morning while still in bed (whether still half asleep or already awake I cannot remember), I had a feeling which, thinking about it later when fully awake, struck me as highly peculiar. It was the idea that it really must be rather pleasant to be a woman succumbing to intercourse’. (Tamar Guimarães )

The resulting work is a vinyl record in which the judge recites excerpts from Schreber’s memoirs under hypnosis. Along with the record there are a few photographs and the letter sent to the judge to ask if he would be willing to take part in the project.

 Tamar Guimarães (b. Belo Horizonte, Brazil) is an artist based in Copenhagen. Thinking of documents as palimpsests, her practice proposes historical narratives as contingent and fluid, and as spaces from which one can speculate on the present. Her recent exhibitions include Panorama, MAM, Sao Paulo, Brazil Dura Lex Sed Lex (no cabelo so Gumex) a solo show at the Kunstpavillon, Innsbruck, Austria; the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia; Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Germany; Bright Morning Star/ Kenneth Anger cycle, at Galeria Zé dos Bois, Lisbon, Portugal; a text for the current issue of Printed Project, published by Visual Artists Ireland; Still / Moving / Still, Knokke-Heist, Belgium; the 7th Gwangju Biennial (Korea); the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial (China); Interfacing, Magnus Muller Gallery, Berlin; I know the world, Smart Project Space, Amsterdam; CPH DOX international documentary film festival, Copenhagen; Thinking Aloud, Overgaden, Copenhagen; Rethinking Nordic Colonialism: A Postcolonial Exhibition Project in Five Acts, Nuuk, Greenland. She was a studio fellow of the Whitney Independent Study Program (NY) in 2007-2008 and a research curator for the Third Guangzhou Triennial in 2008. She is currently at a residency at Capacete Sao Paulo and Rio.

Address:

edificio Copan

Av. Ipiranga 200

Bloco C

apt. 221

São paulo - brazil

 

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