Raphael Fonseca will curate the fourteenth Mercosur Biennial. The Porto Alegre exhibition, considered in the top tier of Brazil’s art events, will open in September 2024. Brazillian Tiago Sant’Ana and Dominican Yina Jiménez Suriel – both born in the 1990s – will assist the 35 year-old chief curator.
No thematic has been released yet, but Rio de Janeiro-born Fonseca referenced the long shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic in the country under Jair Bolsonaro, the country’s far-right former president. ‘All exhibition projects on the scale of a biennial are a mirror of the time in which it takes place’, Fonseca said.
Fonseca has been curator of Latin American modern and contemporary art at the Denver Art Museum since 2021. Alongside Renée Akitelek Mboya, he is also curating the 22nd Contemporary Art Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil which opens in October in São Paulo. From 2017 to 2020, he was a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Niterói.
In Porto Alegre, Anna Mattos and Marina Feldens will head the public programme, and artist Andréa Hygino and educator Michele Ziegt will coordinate education projects.
