This exhibition at the MMK 1 of the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main will be the first ever to provide extensive insights into the photographic œuvre of the artist Claudia Andujar (b. in Neuchâtel, Switzerland in 1931), a resident of Brazil.
In the 1980s, in conjunction with her activist involvement in efforts to protect the Yanomami, one of Brazil’s largest indigenous ethnic group, she produced her important series Marcados (Portuguese for “The Marked Ones”). For the artist, these portraits were the beginning of an in-depth exploration of the Yanomami culture. In addition to the major Marcados series, the exhibition will present photographic workgroups dating from the 1960s to the present. One of them, for example, dates from 1976, when Andujar travelled from São Paulo to the Yanomami in the country’s north, photographically documenting her journey from the rear window of her VW Beetle.
The photographer’s subjective perspective is also...mirrored in her helicopter shots of the seemingly endless modernist network of São Paulo’s streets and the circular communal structures traditionally built by the Yanomami in the midst of lush vegetation in the Amazon region. A juxtaposition amounts to a panorama of Brazil stretching from the city to the wilderness. For the series Rua Direita, she sat down on the pavement of this crowded arterial road in São Paulo and photographed the passers-by with a wide-angle lens. Seen at an extreme angle from below, they come physically close to the photographer but their faces and gestures express detachment, perplexity and resistance. In stark contrast to the intimate portraits of the Yanomami, these shots point to the influence of urban life on human beings. In 1964, shortly before the coup ushering in the military dictatorship that was to last until 1985, Andujar produced the series Marcha da Família, documenting the demonstrations in which nationalist and conservative-minded people of São Paulo protested the founding of a Communist government. Not least of all in view of the continuing protests in Brazil and the country’s recently announced climate goals, Andujar’s œuvre is today as relevant and topical as ever.
The exhibition is being realized with funds from the Kooperationspool of the city of Frankfurt and the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation with kind support from the Brazilian Foreign Ministry Itamaraty, the Consulate General of Brazil, the Goethe-Institut in São Paulo, and the Swiss Consulate General in Frankfurt am Main.
Entrada actualizada el el 15 feb de 2017
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