The PIPA Institute was created in 2009. Initially, its role was to coordinate and provide sustainability to PIPA Prize, incorporating functions that would give cultural vigor to the cycles of the Prize, such as the production of a catalog with all the nominated artists, online category and a website with pages for all the artists. This site today has more than 600 pages of artists, is bilingual and is an important source of research on contemporary Brazilian art. These activities expanded the Prize in several directions, making it happen throughout the year and contributing to the artists having more visibility, here and abroad.

Since 2016, the Institute has been unfolding its activities. We started to develop a collection focused on PIPA Prize artists and having the notion of ‘displacement’ as a guiding umbrella concept. The idea is to increasingly strengthen the collection, through acquisitions and commissions, in addition to participating, to the extent of our scale, in varied projects with artists. The Institute’s acquisitions reflect developments within the Prize itself. Since the pandemic in 2020, PIPA has focused on trajectories initiated in the last 15 years. The idea of ​​being a Prize of foment and not of consecration was strengthened. We started to reward four artists and not just one.

In this last year, in addition to works acquired by the Awarded Artists in 2022 who were on display at Paço Imperial (which is why they are not being shown again), works by Agrade Camiz, Maxwell Alexandre, UYRA, Xadalu, Guilherme Bretas and Elias Maroso were incorporated into the Institute’s collection. Their works strengthen traditional expressive means, such as painting and collage, and experiment with new image production technologies, reconfiguring dissident bodies and identities. Artistic languages, cultural heritages and poetic vectors of changing forms of life force us to review modes of affection and production of meaning. Past and future are transfigured and indeterminate, guiding to a certain futuristic ancestry, opening up possibilities for imagining other ways of being in the present.

PIPA Institute believes, above all, that investing in Brazilian contemporary art is a bet on the possibility of a more plural, more integrated and less unequal future. To learn more about Instituto PIPA browse through their collection.

Luiz Camillo Osorio