Lion, goat, and snake heads; dragon or chicken wings; fire through the nostrils and spells of the tongue!

The image of a mythological beast of a hybrid nature possessing magical powers, hovering above us, gives contours to the haunting enigmas that run through this world and everything else that is intangible. The figure of the Chimera, painted and sculpted since antiquity in countless ways, about which endless legends are told and infinite readings are woven, remixed to exhaustion, provokes and proposes a fatal incognito, a sphinx-like blow with many mouths to devour.

Synonymous with invention, absurdity, fantasy, fable and daydreams of the imagination, Chimera can be used as a synthesis for our approach to Rebecca Sharp and Tadáskía’s projects conceived especially for the context of this huge and complex mansion and the Ivani and Jorge Yunes Collection, a collection as extensive as it is eclectic. Through the absorption and regurgitation of images and certain problematics, Rebecca and Tadáskía’s propositions depart from different imaginative triggers, in order to deal critically with the physical and conceptual qualities of the rooms and certain pieces within this space. The artists, each in their own way, activate enigmas directly related to this place, provoking and offering keys to understanding its architecture and the objects that populate it.

These projects convey ideas related to the expansion of time and space that give rise to channels through which mysteries that add to a certain atmospheric density are displaced. The haze that announces itself in the first room of the exhibition, floats and spreads through the other spaces, while thickening and taking shape as we walk around and unveil each of the interventions among the profusion of artifacts, paintings, sculptures, furniture, carpets, and lamps present there.

Tadáskía presents a group of works assembled under the title Abdução (Abduction). With an interest in the path between the tactile and the ethereal—which is not visible but intuited, and to which one can give form—the artist resorts to subjective questions to create suggestions and situations that broaden the understanding of earthly phenomena. Her works arise from the corporeal and social relationship with the house: in the perception of the multiple temporalities that compose it and in the discussion about the complexities that involve the black and the trans presence—whether in historical representations, in the production of art or in the flow of bodies.

In the homonymous video*, which is set in several spaces of this residence and is divided into six channels—one for each scene that composes it—, we witness a series of actions involving two characters—performed by Tadáskía and by Sabine Passareli. In a brief period of time, between two nights, they communicate through telepathy and subtle movements, exchanging information about their condition and the phenomena occurring around them. They weave with straw, offer each other a small banquet of fruit and black juice, draw on each other’s bare backs, and while one draws, blindfolded, the other observes the sky with a telescope.

*Abduction (2022) is a collaborative work, filmed by Lorena Pazzanese and Octávio Tavares, with soundtrack by Pitter Rocha and special effects by Thales Cardoso.

The drawing, by the way, appears in several ways. In a more direct and literal way, but as a huge graph—a kind of invocation—, born from the black juice spilled on the floor of a courtyard, and also as the specter of a shapeless bird that hovers over the mansion. The black chicken, or mythical bird, flies over the plot as a living omen, a free reference to Sankofa. This winged annunciation connects with the return to the past as a means of altering the present and crafting the future, alluding therefore to the idea that “it is possible to return to a place we have already passed through in order to move forward as we wish,” in the artist’s words. Finally, the drawing can also be seen as choreography and a beam of light, when the girls, facing each other, choreograph a dance full of symbolism, conjecturing a departure from the place, a radical change. Then they dematerialize into luminous points, so that in the final act they ascend—or are abducted.

In continuing this dance of forms, the events of the video are transformed into a set of drawings on fabrics displayed on unique supports, like portals-banners that stand out amidst the visual accumulation. And likewise in an “arrangement”, an installation composed of straw mats—interspersed with bamboo, face powder, fruits, and wires—that finds its place in the center of the house’s chapel, amidst the dramatic aura laden with countless images and ornaments of the Christian tradition. These works are on the razor’s edge between lightness and firmness. The freedom of abstraction gives meaning to pulsating compositions, full of movement, associated with both organic and immaterial elements, and imbued with the dynamics of transmutation.

*Sankofa is one of the Adinkras, a set of ideograms used to synthesize philosophical ideas and proverbs, originally belonging to the Akan-speaking people of West Africa (notably the Ashanti). Symbolized by a mythical bird that flies forward looking back, its meaning relates to “return and seek”.

By tackling the collection through race and gender intersections, Tadáskía also proposes a modification of the entrance hall of the house, the “Sala Império” (Empire Room), usually inhabited by objects and notorious portraits of the white protagonists of Brazil’s official history.

In place of the various paintings of emperors and aristocrats, two canvases of unknown authorship emerge, representing black women in distinct visualities. The first is a spectral figure, anonymous, who carries a certain tone of dullness or melancholy. The second is a representation of the black Virgin, transcendental, in a religious image full of haughtiness and splendor.

Rebecca Sharp’s project establishes a game inside the house. Tributary of historical metaphysics and surrealism, the artist begins with a punctual intervention in the main room. Her Poles cross over a central mirror, interfering with its architectural quality and reflective capacity. These staffs, adorned with a combination of many kinds of materials, symbolize, in a magical way, human presence and consciousness, first inside the pictorial space and then as three-dimensional pieces. To the side, a plait of strings takes hold of a chair in the center of the room. The weave finally extrapolates the object and meanders, animistically, toward a small room encapsulated by the artist.

In this room, on a wall that is seemingly engulfed from above by the darkness of an ethereal metamorphosis, we approach three groups of small-format paintings. In the first series, the works allude to objects in the collection of the Yunes family, to the Hebrew and Greek origins of their name, and to their history of collecting. Thus, they comment on the flow of artworks around the world, ventilating diverse references, ranging from the Silk Roads and the intercontinental movements of transposition of information, people, and objects to the emotional and spiritual connections between different places and planes. They appear as mandalas that link the family to facts and historical speculations about objects that journey around the planet, that leave their creative source and are taken to other corners, becoming part of other contexts, mobilizing new attentions, interpretations, and affections. One must speak, of course, of the profound problems, oppressions, and expropriations involved in these historical processes, but it is also possible to think of art’s longing to move around the globe, of these works’ own agendas, inclined to run around, having people as vectors that make this movement possible.

Another group of works, with an oceanic theme, refers directly to the various pieces in the collection linked to the representation of seascapes, especially the Asian paintings. In them, Rebecca paints a nocturnal and silent sea, grayish, with metallic and cold moons, and other unspeakable phenomena, referring to a metaphysical, internal sea, and its correspondence with meditative processes and states of consciousness. There is also a pair of paintings on the edge of figuration that deal with the energies, masses, and affluences that make up the landscapes. As a backdrop surrounding the room, the sound piece Letter to The Canyon, produced in 2019 by the artist, echoes in an uncanny voice. A mix of ambient music and guided meditation, with a deep sci-fi tone, the audio simulates a message received in the future by a lone navigator in outer space, with considerations and instructions linked to self-knowledge and human development.

Both projects, therefore, gather works that act as reorganizers of the environments’ energy. They resort to esoteric themes and face life’s absurdity head on in order to assert themselves in the context of an excess of information, materials, and stories that intertwine in the collection. They thus experiment with giving voice and body to certain hidden questions, certain mysteries of this world and others. In this oneiric zone that is as much a home as it is a great “museum,” the artists’ gestures provoke us toward the ambivalences of time, toward the unusual and the extraordinary. By taking the house as a support for free imagination, these gestures collaborate with our capacity to actively influence history, to understand its unfoldings in the present, and hopefully, to also invoke what is yet to come.

Germano Dushá

About the artists

Rebecca Sharp (São Paulo, 1976) lives and works between the USA and Brazil. In her poetic-spiritual process, she combines pictorial and meditative practices. Her work explores a variety of astral and mundane planes and, currently, their meeting with each other: unusual worlds covered by abyss in vivid hues that live together in vibrant ways. The canvas works as coded messages, coming from her soul’s inner space. Her delicate, surreal compositions appear almost instinctively once the initial theme is revealed. According to Rebecca, “What I realize today is that the artist’s job is to create and intervene in invisible universes. Long before the painting is ready, the creation and dissolution of a galaxy has already occurred. The work itself is the condensed mantra, a visible and tactile result of what cannot be explained. It is a logbook, an earthly document, an ignition key.” Rebecca graduated in theater and dramatic arts from Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2018, she took part in the 33rd edition of Bienal de São Paulo, Afinidades Afetivas, in the session curated by Sofia Borges. In 2019, she was in residence at the renowned California Institute of Arts. In 2021, she held the solo exhibition Tools for the Wonderland (Mendes Woods, Brussels) and, in 2020, she held her first solo exhibition, Trago a mensagem do destino, at Sé, curated by Tiago de Abreu Pinto.

Tadáskía (Rio de Janeiro, 1993) is a black and trans artist who lives and works between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. She holds a degree in Visual Arts from UERJ (2012-2016) and a master’s degree in Education from UFRJ (2019-2021). Her work in drawing, photography, installation and textiles mobilizes invented and mystical landscapes. Through her practice, she also seeks to elaborate the imaginative experiences of the black diaspora, around family and foreign encounters. She held her first solo exhibition night day (Sé, São Paulo, 2022), curated by Clarissa Diniz. Recent group shows: 37º Panorama da Arte Brasileira: Sob as cinzas, brasa (MAM, São Paulo, 2022), curated by Cauê Alves, Claudinei Roberto da Silva, Cristiana Tejo and Vanessa K. Davidson; Eros Rising: Visions of the Erotic in Latin American Art (ISLAA, Nova York, 2022), curated by Bernardo Mosqueira and Mariano López Seoane; JAIMES (Triangle Asterídes, Marselha, 2022), curated by Marie de Gaulejac; The Silence of Tired Tongues (Framer Framed, Amsterdam, 2022), curated by Raphael Fonseca; Are Artworks Contemporary? (Madragoa, Lisboa, 2022); Setas e turmalinas (Casa de Cultura do Parque, São Paulo, 2022), curated by Gisela Domenisnke; Semana sim, Semana não: paisagens, corpos e cotidianos entre um século (Casa Zalszupin, São Paulo, 2022) curated by Germano Dushá; Uma história natural das ruínas (Pivô, São Paulo, 2021), curated by Catalina Lozano; Os monstros de Babaloo (Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo, 2021), curated by Victor Gorgulho; A máquina lírica (Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, 2021), curated by Pollyana Quintella, 2021; O canto do bode (Casa da Cultura da Comporta, 2021), curated by Galeria Luisa Strina, Sé e Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Hábito/habitante (EAV Parque Lage, 2021), curated by Ulisses Carrilho; Casa Carioca (Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro, 2020-21), curated by Joice Berth and Marcelo Campos; Esqueleto (Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro, 2019-2020), curated by Analu Cunha, Marcelo Campos and Maurício Castro; Estopim e segredo (EAV Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro, 2019-2020), curated by Gleyce Kelly Heitor, Ulisses Carrilho and Clarissa Diniz. In addition to having held the exhibition with Leonilson at Auroras (São Paulo, 2020) and the open studio in exhibition format Ocellets, during the Homesession residency (Barcelona, ​​2022).

About the curator

Germano Dushá (Serra dos Carajás, 1989) is a writer, curator, critic and cultural agent based in São Paulo. He holds a BA in Law and a postgraduate degree in Art: Criticism and Curatorship; and works mainly with autonomous organizations, and curatorial, literature, and multimedia experiments. He is the coordinator of Fora – pluridisciplinar organization focused on multidisciplinary cultural initiatives and institutional strategies, and of Genesys – its arm for experimental formats. He has collaborated with a number of institutions, publications and galleries in different countries; and among his projects, he has cofounded Coletor (2012-2016)—an independent itinerant platform for contemporary art practices—; Observatório (2015-2016)—an exhibition space for contemporary art and culture—; BANAL BANAL (2016-2021)—an online platform for contemporary art—; and um trabalho um texto (2016-2022)—an exhibition program for contemporary art and textual production.