Between Tarsila do Amaral, Rosana Paulino and Sidney Amaral

racial issues and memory in the Tempos Fraturados exhibition at MAC-USP

Abstract

This article focuses on five works from the new long-term exhibition at MAC-USP, Tempos Fraturados, exploring how an established collection can be reinterpreted to propose new social, artistic, racial, and political readings from the same pieces. The artworks are: A Negra by Tarsila do Amaral, Assentamento 2 and 3 by Rosana Paulino, and Meu coração brasileiro and Canto para Ogum by Sidney Amaral. We will base our study on exhibition research that views them as multifaceted constructed discourses, broadening the possible meanings of the displayed works. We start with Ulpiano de Menezes' text Do teatro da memória ao laboratório da História: a exposição museológica e o conhecimento histórico, examining the potential of museum exhibitions as privileged places for critical readings of the world, rather than mere repositories of artifacts. Moreover, considering it is an art museum, its collection has greater value than just documentation, as the works create their meanings with the viewer, as Umberto Eco asserts in Obra Aberta. Another text used in analyzing the exhibition is Passados presentes: mídia, política, amnésia by Andreas Huyssen, highlighting memory as a fixation of the contemporary world. The author suggests a paradigm shift in recent years: the “emergence of memory as one of the central cultural and political concerns of Western societies,” characterizing a “return to the past,” which necessarily involves decolonial discourses that challenge the modernity visions of the 19th and 20th centuries and early modernism.