Rosângela Rennó (b. 1962) is a visual artist who lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Rennó obtained her degree in fine arts from the Escola Guignard in Belo Horizonte in 1986 and in architecture from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in 1987. In 1997, Rennó obtained her arts doctorate from the School of Communications and Arts of the Universidade of São Paulo.
Since its inception as a place and a concept, Latin America has been grappling with ways in which to construct and divide the real. Real myths and histories, real identities and communities, real nations and citizens were often created and solidified through fiction. Seldom understood as the opposite of reality, fiction functioned (and still does) uniquely in Latin America as a tool—for interpretation, planning, and execution. This blurring of the traditional opposition between reality and fiction has, consequently, been productively explored and exploited in the region by both art and politics.
The Columbia University — ISLAA Colloquium will gather contemporary artists and scholars that embrace and explore this understanding of fiction and its utility. We will consider practices that engage with fragments of the real, appropriate them and, through fiction, stitch those fragments together to (re)construct a new version of reality, proposing new parcellations of it. Often, these works react to the furious debates about factuality that have been altering notions of the common in Latin America, and enact stark critiques of arguably oppressive historical fictions—proposing affect-imbued versions of the real and its demarcations.
Invited participants will engage with scholars (both faculty and graduate students) to discuss their work as it interacts tangentially with politics, obliquely intervening it through the (re)construction of history, identity, and communities.
Panel 1
Rosângela Rennó and Thyago Nogueira, moderated by Ana Luiza de Abreu Claudio
Panel 2
Mapa Teatro and Claire Bishop, moderated by Luise Malmaceda
Organized by Alexander Alberro and Jerónimo Duarte-Riascos
Both panels will take place in-person at Schermerhorn 807, Columbia University
About The Speaker(s)
Rosângela Rennó
Thyago Nogueira
Thyago Nogueira is the head of the Contemporary Photography Department at Instituto Moreira Salles, Rio de Janeiro, and editor of the Brazilian photography magazine ZUM. He has curated numerous exhibitions, including Claudia Andujar: The Yanomami Struggle (Instituto Moreira Salles, 2019; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, 2020; and the Shed, New York; 2023), Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective (Instituto Moreira Salles, 2022), Miguel Rio Branco: Crossed, Dreamed, Torn, Stolen, Used, Bled Words... (2022), and William Eggleston, American Color (Instituto Moreira Salles, 2015).
Mapa Teatro
Mapa Teatro is an artist laboratory based in Bogotá. For forty years, this transdisciplinary collective has been dealing with the themes of myth, history, and reality, with the aim of constructing polyphonic fictions traversed by poetic-political media.
Claire Bishop
Professor Claire Bishop teaches art history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her books include Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012), Tania Bruguera in conversation with Claire Bishop (Fundación Cisneros, 2019), and the forthcoming Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today.
