Avaliação: Historia del arte y la estética de las Américas: global y local – The Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente at the 11th Berlin Biennale 2020 – A case study on the potentials and limits to decolonization

Over the past two decades, alongside continued efforts to overcome the North-South divide by fostering decolonial thinking and practices, artists from Latin America have become frequent guests at European large-scale exhibitions. But until the 11th Berlin Biennale 2020, it had never happened that an entire event mainly focused on artistic positions from the region. The curatorial concept for the biennial envisaged the deconstruction of modern legacies and cultural hegemony, taking as a key figure Brazilian artist, architect, and critic Flávio de Carvalho (1899-1973). Although even in his home country rather unknown, his visionary mind was crucial to the development of modern art by advocating art forms at the time not accepted by the official art canon, like abstract art or the art of children and psychiatric patients. Hence, the biennial’s conceptual axis devoted to counter-narratives of the museum institution centrally displayed works by psychiatric patients from Rio de Janeiro’s Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente. Using the presentation of these works at the Berlin Biennale as a case study for the potentials and limits to decolonization at large-scale exhibitions is intriguing in two ways: First, being works from psychiatric patients as well as from a Non-Western country, they present a kind of “other-other” to Western hegemonic culture. Second, being placed in the curatorial axis of institutional critique, it challenges the very normative structures it is made part of. This paper examines the explicit and implicit narratives of oppression and liberation that can be derived from this contribution. What are the narratives of the original geographic and historical context chosen by the curatorial team? How were they embedded in the biennial’s overall concept, related to the local presentation context, and how were they received by the public? Are there significant gaps between mediation and reception? And if so, what untold narratives could fill these gaps?

• decolonization
• psychiatry
• outsider art
• biennial
• Brazil