Decolonizing Moving Image Art
This dissertation project aims to shed light on the particularities of presenting, archiving, and theorizing moving image art in the Global South. One paradigmatic example of recent developments in this field is the Contemporary Art Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil, organized by the cultural association Videobrasil in São Paulo, Brazil. What started in 1983 as a national festival showing mostly VHS und U-Matic videotapes gradually transformed into its current format of an international art biennial that is open to works produced in all possible media. Over the course of this development, Videobrasil also prioritized partnerships with other players from the “South” in what could be seen as a “parallel circuit” to the hegemonic art world established in western Europe and the USA.
In order to fully grasp and analyze the specificities of Videobrasil and its partners, I intend to expand the existing debate around the new configurations of film in the context of contemporary art using postcolonial analytical frameworks. Different approaches, like the decolonial shift or the localization of hybrid cultures, will be helpful to understand the aesthetic, social, and political negotiations at stake in dealing with moving image art around the globe today.
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Profile
Laura Teixeira is a curator based in Berlin, Germany. She is currently working on her dissertation as part of the DFG Graduiertenkolleg “Configurations of Film” at the Goethe University Frankfurt and directs the Días de Cine – Latin American Film Festival. She was assistant curator at the Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst and film curator at the DFF Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, where she organized the Lecture&Film series together with Prof. Vinzenz Hediger from 2017 to 2020. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Film Studies at the Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar) in her home country Brazil, before completing a Master’s degree in Médiation Culturelle at the Université de Liège, Belgium, and a second M.A. in Curatorial Studies at the Städelschule and Goethe University in Frankfurt. In the winter semester 2023-24 she had a teaching assignment at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz on the topic “Devouring Brazilian Film Histories.”
teixeira[at]tfm.uni-frankfurt.de