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Rivane Neuenschwander was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in 1967, where she continues to live and work. Many things fascinate her—the nature of time, the fragility of life, cycles of existence, mysteries of perception, the delicacy of human exchange—but no one thing characterizes the art she makes. Nor does her work conform to traditional understanding of artistic categories. This survey from 2000 to the present is composed of painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, film, participatory actions, and performance. For some of the work on view, Neuenschwander is the sole creator. Other pieces are the result of collaborations, with entities as varied as musicians, forensic artists, bar patrons, and the exhibition’s visitors.

Circles and ovals are of primary importance to Neuenschwander’s work. Drops of water, bubbles, sprocket holes, hole-punched confetti, eggs, moons, constellations, and cascading zeros all play a role, sometimes as soundtracks or symbols of fragility, trail markers or life sources, symbols of the natural world or the feminine principle. Much of her oeuvre is also about measuring passing time: calendars, both marking the past and rushing to the future. Her maps, whether tracking visitors’ paths through the exhibition or presenting the blurred boundaries of those exposed to the elements during the rainy season are about creating new geographies for new explorations.

Throughout her career, Neuenschwander has also created participatory art. The situations she engenders are most often invitations to create something new in a context where the visitor defines the rules. In this exhibition, I Wish Your Wish is the most generous of her public actions. Desires printed on satin ribbons are for the taking; all the artist asks in return is that a new wish is left behind to be shared with future audiences. Neuenschwander’s inspiration for the work comes from the ribbons tied to the gates surrounding the church of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim (Our Lord of the Good End) in Bahia, Brazil. It is important to note that Neuenschwander comes from one of the most important art-generating countries in the world. Brazil has been an international creative force for the entirety of the twentieth century and continues now into the twenty-first. Movements such as Neoconcretism and Tropicalismo have produced artists of supreme originality, including (to name a few) Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and Cildo Meireles. This too is Neuenschwander’s history, and it can be felt in the liberated formalism of her art, distinguished and shaped as it is by the liquid notion of time, the endless respiration of creativity, the incessant mutation of physical spaces, and the need for storytelling.

The importance of literary sources is notable and can be seen in her psychologically complex adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s novella First Love, which, in Neuenschwander’s work, involves a narrative, informed by memory and nostalgia, being told to a forensic artist to recreate the face of a beloved whose been lost in the past. The inevitability of a new entity—part memory, part fiction—is the result of a partnership between the narrator and the recorder. The sprawling compilation of anonymous tales that makes up One Thousand and One Nights, also known as Arabian Nights, provides the artist with another way of measuring time. In the “Nights”, every evening marks the narration of another story and, as the stories go forward, order is established and maintained. That said, the fertility of the human imagination is what carries the tales aloft and offers the promise of immortality.  In Neuenschwander’s “Nights”, the pages from the books of the tales become collage elements used to create constellations and a calendar.  As in much of the artist’s work, seeing is a complex experience leading to parallel worlds where foreground and background are in a constant state of flux.

“Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other” is curated by Richard Flood, Chief Curator at the New Museum. The exhibition is organized by the New Museum in collaboration with the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Banner image: Chove Chuva [Rain Rains], 2003
Aluminum buckets, water, steel cable, ladder.
Dimensions variable
Installation view at Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte; image courtesy the artist.