Laura Lima: Balé Literal

Laura Lima grew up in the city of Governador Valadares, in Minas Gerais. When she was still very young, Lima moved to Rio de Janeiro, where she lives now. She graduated in Philosophy from Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro in the 1990s and also studied at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro. In 1999, she founded the body Representante guion [hyphen] Representante (RhR) and served as its first bureaucratic administrator. Lima created a glossary and an archive of RhR’s activities, including ideas such as the philosophy of nothingness, non-functionality, emptiness and failure. Lima was awarded the Marcantonio Vilaça Prize (2006) and was nominated for the Francophone Prize (2011) and the Han Nefkens Prize (2012). She was the first Latin American recipient of the Bonnefanten Award for the Contemporary Arts (BACA) (Maastricht, the Netherlands) in 2014. Lima has put on solo exhibitions of her work in venues around the world such as Pinacoteca in Sao Paulo, Brazil; Fondazione Prada in Milan, Italy; the Pampulha Art Museum in Belo Horizonte, Brazil; the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, Argentina; MUAC, Mexico City, Mexico; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland; Casa Francia Brasil, Rio de Janeiro; Eva Klabin Foundation, Rio de Janeiro; Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden; Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, the Netherlands; SMK – National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen. Lima’s work has been included in prestigious collective exhibitions, such as the 24th and 27th Sao Paulo Biennials; the 2nd and 3rd Mercosur Biennials in Porto Alegre, Brazil; the 11th Lyon Biennale in 2011; the Sharjah Biennial in 2019; the Busan Bienniale in South Korea; the Kaunas Biennial in Lithuania and the Stockholm Film Festival. Her works form part of the collections of the Inhotim Institute, the Bonniers Konsthall, the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, the Pampulha Art Museum, the Zabludowicz Collection, the Bonnefantenmuseum and more. Laura Lima lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Together with Ernesto Neto and Marcio Botner, she is also a co-founder of A Gentil Carioca, a gallery directed by artists in Rio de Janeiro. Constantly escaping from easy classification, Laura Lima’s “images” are not “performance, installation or cinema”, but try to articulate visually, in concrete reality, a personal glossary of concepts on which she has been working and reworking throughout her over 20-year career. Emblematic of this rigorous conceptual commitment is her best-known group of works Homem=carne / Mulher=carne (Man = meat / Woman = meat), in which humans and animals are used as mere matter (meat) that executes a precise set of instructions over and over again during the entire exhibition. Another part of Lima’s work is related to the notion of ornamental philosophy. Her oeuvre proposes new interpretations of accepted definitions and concepts, destabilising and subverting what is taken for granted.

Currently the director of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). She has been the director and chief curator of The Showroom in London, as well as lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a member of the Thought Council, Fondazione Prada. She has previously been curator of the Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art; curator of international art at Tate Modern, London; artistic director of Rencontres Picha – Lubumbashi Biennial, Democratic Republic of the Congo; curator of contemporary art at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC), Seville; senior curator at Creative Time in New York; and curator of contemporary art at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM) in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria.