Canseira

Solo exhibition by Sofia Caesar at Centro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro

Sofia Caesar's solo show Canseira ('a stubborn laziness, tiredness, or boredom') brings together works that the artist has developed over the past years, arising from the relationship between the body and its surroundings. The works in the exhibition are related to the appropriation of pleasure and leisure by western logics of productivity. They use resources ranging from Youtube videos to beach chairs, stock images of people working while resting, safety nets, smartphones, and documentation of installations by Hélio Oiticica and Neville de Almeida. Caesar shows us a body that allows itself to fall. Her gestures of appropriation and intervention manifest themselves through performances, videos, and installations, which raise the public's physical awareness of the complex condition of the body, intermingling pause and activity.

In the context of Caveat, Sofia Caesar has developed research by engaging with moving bodies, including her own. Through her performative work, she investigates the body’s resistance to the recuperation of pleasure and leisure within capitalist societies and the world of work. Inhabiting contradictions between leisure time and work time, she is looking for an escape from this binary opposition, exploring possibilities to improvise within the body’s constraints and conditions.

Engaging in Caveat, the artist worked towards the solo exhibition, Canseira, which showcases Caesar’s practice from the past three years, bringing together works that deal with the historical ghosts that haunt the Centro de Arte Helio Oiticica building due to its connection to the oeuvre of artist Hélio Oiticica and the Brazilian avant-garde. Caesar addresses how utopian practices like Oiticica’s have been incorporated in what Caesar calls ‘western play aesthetics’. Infantile, unproductive, bored, tired, playful, passive, and heavy, are a few of the bodily states Caesar brings awareness to in her performances and participatory works.

Curated by Raphael Fonseca and supported by Caveat, Rumos Itaú Cultural, Galeria Cavalo, Guerra Divulgacão and HISK. The exhibition, which occupies the entire second floor of the building, opens with a durational performance from 12h to 18h.