It is with great delight that the PIPA Institute announces the four Awarded Artists of PIPA Prize 2023. For more than 13 years fulfilling the mission of promoting and supporting Brazilian visual artists, the Prize is a reference in the field of national contemporary art. Beyond the award itself, PIPA also works as a platform for dissemination through its catalogues, websites, social media (Instagram, Facebook and Twitter), YouTube video channel and podcast, bringing together exclusive content that makes up a rich source of research.
In this edition of PIPA Prize, there is a total of 73 Participating Artists – of which 61 were nominated for the first time – chosen by the Nominating Committee. Maintaining the format of the last two editions, the Prize is focused on a more recent production, being directed to artists who had their first solo or group exhibition no longer than 15 years ago. The Prize’s goal is to be a boost for artists at the beginning of their careers who develop distinguished works.
More than a decade since the creation of the Prize, we maintain its essence, while understanding that the art scene in the country is alive, what demands a careful observation to adapt to new formats and needs of the field. We keep in mind that Brazil has several regional artistic micro-scenes, and we are interested in affirming them in their diversity. The four Awarded Artists show how plural the Brazilian artistic production is, mixing heterogeneous languages and knowledges that develop throughout the territory.
As the last few years, the four artists will take part in an in-person exhibition to be held at Paço Imperial, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, between September 09 and November 12, 2023, and they will also participate in an online exhibition/virtual takeover on the Prize’s websites and social media. The virtual exhibition, also held in the last three editions, is yet another way for a greater dissemination of the artists’ work, making it possible for people from abroad to access the content, beyond the experience of the physical environment set up in Rio de Janeiro.
The curator of the PIPA Institute, Luiz Camillo Osorio, presents the Awarded Artists, articulating the selection based on Brazilian art’s current moment:
“The four artists awarded by PIPA in 2023 – Glicéria Tupinambá (BA), Helô Sanvoy (GO), Iagor Peres (RJ) and Luana Vitra (MG) – make explicit the plastic strength extracted from dissident bodies and their daily struggles. More than just the conquest of visibility, they fill in the gaps with meaning. Symptomatically, the presence of dance, the body and performance permeates the four poetics. The metabolization of materials, the transfiguration of mineral and organic elements (iron, glass, leather, skin), the displacement of bodies, the retrieval of the memory of ancestral practices and rituals, everything in these productions speaks of transition, of passage, of the abandonment of fixed identities and the search for indeterminate symbiosis. The title of one of Luana Vitra’s pieces, ‘Isca de confusão’ [Bait of confusion], seems to bring out a common element to these four unique poetics. Confusion is what escapes the instituted order, it is what still doesn’t have a defined form. Finally, a happy coincidence: there couldn’t be a more promising moment for awarding the work of Glicéria Tupinambá, in which the return/devolution of one of the Tupinambá Mantles from Denmark is discussed. Past and future, memory and reinvention, meet again in the present.”
We invite you to know more about the Awarded Artists of PIPA 2023, selected by the Board (the following names are in alphabetical order, click on the images to expand):
Glicéria Tupinambá, also known as Célia Tupinambá, is from the Serra do Padeiro village, located in the Tupinambá Indigenous Land of Olivença, in the south of the state of Bahia. She participates intensely in the political and religious life of the Tupinambá, getting involved especially in issues related to education, the productive organization of the village, social services, and women’s rights.
She was a teacher at the State Indigenous School Tupinambá of Serra do Padeiro. She concluded the Intercultural Indigenous Graduation in the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Bahia (IFBA) and is doing her master’s degree in PPGAS – post-graduate program in Social Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro – UFRJ. She was president of the Association of Tupinambá Indians of Serra do Padeiro, being responsible for the approval and management of projects aimed at strengthening the village.
Video produced by Do Rio Filmes exclusively for PIPA 2023:
Helô Sanvoy was born in Goiânia-GO (1985), Brazil, and nowadays lives in São Paulo. He has a degree in Visual Arts from the Federal University of Goiás (UFG) and holds a master’s degree in Visual Poetics from the University of São Paulo (USP). Sanvoy is a member of the performance collective Grupo EmpreZa since 2011, in which he develops a strong research on the poetics of the body and its derivatives. As a solo artist, in his research he seeks experimentation and the combination of different materials, as well as the experimentation of processes, languages and supports. The artist held solo exhibitions at: MAC/GO (2014, GO), CAL/UnB (2014, DF), Referência Art Gallery (2018, DF) and Andrea Rehder Contemporary Art (2017, 2018 and 2020, SP). He was selected for the 30th CCSP Exhibition Program (2020, SP) and for the Project Season at Paço das Artes (2022, SP). He participated in exhibitions such as: Bienal do Mercosul (2020, RS); Danger Zone (2016, PR and PE); Images That Don’t Conform (2021, RJ), and Carolina Maria de Jesus – a Brazil for Brazilians (2021, SP). Sanvoy has work in collections, such as: Rio Art Museum (MAR), Rio de Janeiro-RJ; Museum of Art of Rio Grande do Sul (MARGS), Porto Alegre-RS; São Paulo Cultural Center (CCSP), São Paulo-SP; Amazonian Art Collection of the Federal University of Pará, Belém-PA; Museum of Contemporary Art of Goiás (MAC-GO), Goiânia-GO, and Museum of Photography, Fortaleza-CE.
Video produced by Do Rio Filmes exclusively for PIPA 2023:
“I have been looking for ways to remove the body from the traps of vision and thus, observe other visible and invisible densities that make up our relationships in space, to critically think about their agencies, formativities and the way we see them in the world. Trying to understand how we deal with what escapes a name and what we cannot see. To that end, I focus on the creation of amorphous and unstoppable materialities, the result of the combination of synthetic and organic compounds that permeate most of my works.
I situate my practice in the friction between sculpture, video, installation, and performance, reflecting. I’ve been asking myself, how do we dismiss the idea of Thing from the matter’s recategorization processes? How and why we separate the Things, feeding a narrative created by a world revealed in luminosity and vision traps. Doubting the apparent world and establishing dynamics between the removal and positioning of bodies (materials) in spaces, I have been working on questioning production’s tools of difference developed by white-western thoughts concerning bodies not understood as Life.”
Member of the Carni Collective – Coletivo de Arte Negra e Indígena, currently participating in the PEI – Programa de Estudios Independientes at MACBA in Barcelona. Winner awarded at the Prince Clauss Seed Awards in 2021, Premio Foco 2022 and at the 6th Edition of the EDP Nas Artes Prize at Instituto Tomie Ohtake, SP, 2018. Participant in the CCSP exhibition program in 2020. Resident at Villa Waldberta, Munich, GER for the residency PlusAfroT, 2019. In the same year, he did an art residency in Lugar a Dudas, Calí, Colombia.
Video produced by Do Rio Filmes exclusively for PIPA 2023:
Luana grew up in Contagem, an industrial city that made her body live through iron and soot. Raised by a carpenter (father) and a wordsmith (mother), she moves as she prays, searching for the survival and the healing of the landscapes she inhabits. Luana understands the body itself as a trap, and her actions as micropolitics that deal with the spatiality that her work evokes, confronts and confuses.
Video produced by Do Rio Filmes exclusively for PIPA 2023:
As in previous years, all artists participating in this 14th edition are invited to participate in PIPA Online. The two most voted artists in the second round of voting, which takes place on the Prize’s websites, will each receive R$5,000. The online voting, which starts on July 31st, has proven to be effective to promote the artists from multiple areas to a larger audience.
The Prize’s current format is part of PIPA Institute’s focus to intensify the acquisition of works by artists who participate in the Prize. Several works from the collection will be presented in the exhibition that will also take place at Paço Imperial, in the same period as the exhibition of the four Awarded Artists of PIPA 2023.
To learn more about the Awarded Artists and about the other PIPA Prize 2023 participants, visit their pages containing photos of work, interviews, CVs and much more. Also visit the PIPA Institute website to discover our collection.