As we continue with the Exhibition Program of the Bachelor’s Degrees in Visual Arts at the Faculty of Fine Arts of FAAP, we present the production developed by young artists who, having recently completed their formal education in the arts, seek to insert their works into the so-called “art system,” gathering them in this collective exhibition they have named “das capitanias do seu corpo” (from the captaincies of their body).
Thus, in its ninth year of existence, the Program makes it possible to perceive the Institution’s commitment to supporting and fostering cultural activities, especially those of an artistic nature. With this action, the Foundation once again aims to encourage the development of visual production and support the realization of a first joint exhibition – one that already takes place outside the academic environment – facilitating the visibility of the deepening in the issues originally addressed by students throughout their course and further explored in the presentation of their final graduation projects.
As in previous editions of the Program, in its various organizational situations, a common point remains visible among each group involved in this process of organizing the exhibition: the discussion and reflections surrounding the choice of the title by which they identified this set of artworks and artistic practices produced for the exhibition.
The apparent disparity that visitors may identify in the titles of the works, however, reveals one of the most pressing issues for each of them upon leaving the protected academic space: even after their experience of publicizing their research and processes through defending their investigations. Each of them presents different nuances, doubts, and difficulties on how to embark on the experience of professional insertion into the world.
Having experienced their academic journey more intensely in the final semesters of their undergraduate studies, these individuals, who are no longer students and have completed their course after a four-year journey together, were able to share doubts, aspirations, fears, difficulties, dreams, needs, anxieties, discoveries, and efforts to develop, produce, reflect on, and present their creative process to each of the examining boards they faced and to public scrutiny, still within the confines of an educational institution.
The experience, for them, immediately presents itself with the exhibition, and it is necessary for the group, collectively, to find a way to carry it forward. Each of them is presented with the possibility of developing a proposal that, combined with their investigative interests, explores and develops within the real limits of the temporal and spatial conditions they must adhere to: about two months of planning, organization, and production, as well as the characteristics of the exhibition space of the MAB/Centro room. Therefore, it is a matter of producing while adapting to this reality, without giving up their processes, conducting internal negotiations within the group of participants for occupations and cohabitations, in a process similar to those increasingly present in the organizational processes of contemporary art exhibitions.
The works are the results of each artist’s choices, allowing them to present their visual production, for the first time, detached from the condition of art students. The works that make up the exhibition contribute to the valorization of the potential of a new generation of young artists who outline a panorama of contemporaneity from their perspective.
In “das capitanias do seu corpo,” each of the artists explores processes, even those considered traditional, such as painting and drawing, or those that incorporate collaborative processes into artistic practices. The works affirm the possibilities of coexistence and exchange of experiences that present themselves to this group. The production, also documented by the catalog accompanying and recording the exhibition, presents its own systematic research, in line with the development of particular paths traversed by each of them, showing the intersection and fusion of media, as well as the investigation and management of content from various areas of knowledge.
In the words of the young artists participating in the exhibition, “das capitanias do seu corpo” “carries within it the idea of division, present internally in the subject and externally between the self and the other. The idea that the environment where this occurs is by excellence one where the body houses all the multiplicity of these places of power/relationship: the self/body and the other/body. In short, we want to problematize the internal and external territories. We, inhabitants of these bodies, attempt to create/propose ways to manage, operate, relate, create through sensitive experiences and thought.”
As in previous occasions before the selection of proposals and presented works leaves no room for doubts about the expectations of these artists facing a new horizon unfolding as a professional perspective. In addition to these expectations, the choice also signifies an affirmation of how they see themselves – young, newly graduated visual arts students – when leaving the art school environment.
With “das capitanias do seu corpo,” the young artists also aim to integrate the city’s artistic and cultural calendar, offering possible conditions for a necessary external perception of this production and, beyond the strict academic scope, they enhance this practice of valuing students and their production by providing visibility to the research developed by them, starting from actions initiated within the Faculty.
Exhibitions organized to present the works of those who have completed their undergraduate studies in visual arts should thus be seen from a broader perspective than that of mere institutional activity. It is relevant for them and important for their development process that the restlessness, characteristic of this production of artists in the process of formation, finds resonances and dissonances when confronted with the reality outside the protected educational circle.
Another of the frequently present issues in discussions about contemporary production, and more precisely about that of young artists who have just graduated or are still in the process of completing their training courses, is exactly how they react, or have reacted, to the different forms of pressure that an artistic circuit, increasingly visible due to the presence of commercial art spaces, can exert on them. The desire and need for professionalization, insertion, and seeing oneself in this professional sphere – beyond museums, institutions, and cultural centers, commercial galleries, auctions, and fairs – is one of the difficulties that each of them, individually, must face and build a relationship capable of ensuring autonomy and independence in the process and experimentation.
With each module of the Program, different arrangements and combinations of the group of Bachelor’s degrees in Fine Arts are identified, and this implies that we reflect on the meaning of production, as well as its distinction and diversity, due to the guided research in visual poetics developed by them, but it also implies looking carefully at the potential activities resulting from investigations in visual arts, but from a theoretical perspective – history, theory, criticism, curation, to name a few – another possible aspect for the work.
In this edition, particularly, this is evident in the group’s involvement in participating in the process of expanding the exhibition’s actions, through the lens of the discussion proposed in a public meeting to be held during the exhibition period, thus expanding the scope of possible discussions and reflections on contemporary artistic practices.
Once again, and still at the risk of seeming repetitive to those who have followed this Exhibition Program since its inception, it is about recovering and affirming here the relationship of this exhibition with those previously presented. The exhibition should be seen as a pioneering and differentiating activity, due to its committed sense of continuity with didactic activities. This reading is not only restricted to FAAP but also in relation to other similar institutions, and it brings to the public visiting MAB/Centro the production that demonstrates the development of its own systematic monitoring of the graduate, consistent with the elaboration of particular paths for each of them, who make up a future generation of artists.
In conclusion, it is necessary to reaffirm the initiative of this Program as part of
