On June 27, at 2 pm, the seminar ‘The decolonial turn in Brazilian art’ will be held, with the participation of Alessandra Simões Paiva, lecturer at the Federal University of Southern Bahia (Brazil) and visiting researcher at the University of Leeds (UK), and moderation by Patricia Posch, collaborating researcher at the Communication and Society Research Centre (Portugal).

The event will address the unique transformation underway in the Brazilian contemporary art system, which has seen exponential growth in works dealing with issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender and geopolitics. These works signal a radical change in the structure of this system, defined as the decolonial turn in Brazilian art. The webinar aims to look at this phenomenon in the field of visual arts from a multidisciplinary theoretical perspective, paying attention to the following question: can the insurgence of decolonial poetics put pressure on the Brazilian art system, causing a fundamental change in the ways its institutions operate, making them more inclusive and democratic?

Alessandra Simões Paiva has worked as an art critic for three decades. She is currently a lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Degree in Arts and its Technologies and the Postgraduate Programme in Teaching and Ethnic-Racial Relations at the Federal University of Southern Bahia, Brazil, and a visiting researcher at the University of Leeds (UK). Her research focuses on the relationship between Latin American visual arts and the theme of ‘decoloniality’, emphasising aesthetic-political, collective and collaborative practices, understood as an integrating and radicalising force in contemporary social movements, in rural and urban spaces. She is a member of the Brazilian Association of Art Critics (ABCA), the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and the European Network of Brazilianists Working in Cultural Analysis (REBRAC/UK). She authorises the book ‘The Decolonial Turn in Brazilian Art’ (Editora Mireveja, 2022). She writes for ArtNexus magazine and won the Young Critics Award (AICA/2012) and the Gonzaga Duque Award (ABCA/2023).

Patricia Posch is a collaborating researcher at the Communication and Society Research Centre (University of Minho, Portugal), a researcher in the Art, Culture and Power research group (UERJ, Brazil) and a collaborator in the Diaspotics research group (UFRJ, Brazil). She has a PhD in Cultural Studies, and her research interests centre on culture, communication, visual culture and art, focusing on transnational migrations, intercultural communication and contemporary art. She is currently co-coordinator of the Visual Culture Working Group of the Portuguese Association of Communication Sciences (SOPCOM) and a member of the project ‘Migrations, media and Activism in Portuguese: Decolonising Media Landscapes and Imagining Alternative Futures’.

An initiative organised by SOPCOM’s Working Group on Visual Culture, in partnership with the Seminar on Communication and Diversity (SCD) at the University of Minho and the project ‘Migrations, media and activism in Portuguese: decolonising media landscapes and imagining alternative futures’.

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