Barra das Garças, Brazil, 1991. – Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.
Represented by Galeria Lume and Galeria Movimento
PIPA 2024 Nominee

Multimedia artist and poet, born in the Araguaia valley (Barra do Garças/MT – Aragarças/GO), a border region between Goiás and Mato Grosso, a well-known route and gateway to the Legal Amazon, a crucial place to understand the essence and motivations of his work. His research emerges from his experience in the mid-west backlands, marked by the configuration of his mixed-race and marginalized family.

The artist investigates projects of amnesty, memory and identity that support official history, as he seeks answers about his own origin. Born into a family structure shaped by violence and abandonment, the artist’s history and work mix, denouncing themes of a “forgotten” Brazil, the result of agribusiness and mining on the banks of the Araguaia River.

Deploying the concept of “memory-forgetting” and the “writing-rewriting” of history, the artist appropriates official symbolic objects and documentation processes/objects that have been used in recent decades (such as typing, identity cards, stamps). Materialities and technical processes used to document the official and therefore capable of forging the mythology of a country and marking individuality.

In his multidisciplinary research, moving between typing painting, infogravure, installation, video art and the creation of objects, Hal Wildson uses the official documentation resources to question the “memory-forgetting” projects applied as social control policies. His work dares to confront and dispute the power of the symbolic as an alternative to creating fairer realities, writing a future by rewriting the past.