Máscara, Maré, Memória - Mask, Tide, Memory

Mask, Tide, Memory establishes poetic and imagistic bridges between works by artists from Brazil’s Northeast and North and works by Brazilian artists from other regions. The exhibition proposes horizontal readings, free from the hierarchical divisions imposed by the art market and by art institutions, which often privilege artists from the Southeast, many of whom remain little seen in Maranhão. Through these multiple connections, the exhibition argues that the local scene shares critical concerns with national and international artistic contexts. It challenges the notion of backwardness and underdevelopment commonly associated with the region, revealing instead its pioneering force and sophistication in relation to central questions in contemporary art.

Mask presents works that use disguise not as a denial of individuality, but as a tool for imagining other forms of existence and for seeking the body in its fullness across different realities. Cultural practices are painted, sewn, embroidered, and adorned by hands that invoke entities, adding and removing visible layers from the living flesh of personal histories and desires for being. In its ambiguity, the mask allows both an escape from the harshness of repression imposed on socially oppressed bodies and the celebration and proud recovery of who one truly is, through and despite corporeality. It acts as a transitional object, emphasizing the two states it connects. Understood beyond an instrument of illusion, the mask is raised like a banner of honor.

Tide evokes the surge of natural force that oscillates through the gravitational pull between the moon, the earth, and the sea. As waves break along the shore, the tide disperses into sound, smell, and atmosphere. Beyond a geophysical phenomenon, the tide is a concentrated and living immaterial force, a multisensory entity that brings forth the calm of belonging and the comfort of the relationship between body and place. It recalls an expanded and hyperconnected way of thinking, in which macrocosmic events interfere with spiritual subjectivities and smaller physical occurrences. It governs what is served at the table, from the closed fishing season to the full net; what is born and brought into the world; the bath taken at high tide. A place is known through its tide, not only as physical water, but as a memorial flow that persists even in its absence, through memories that rise and recede and shape the idea of home. In the tide, one can glimpse the return of ancestral ties lost to Atlantic violence, carried through the rivers that run across our land.

Memory reflects on the fragmentation of individual and autobiographical recollections, which may nevertheless take part in a collective memorial sense through images that endure and cut across time. How can we speak collectively of memory when it is so intimate and personal? How can images overflow individual experience and produce a collective emotion, reverberating through each observer in singular ways? This section sets out to examine images and narratives that flow and fade over time without record, intensifying the nostalgia of memory itself while also proposing the recovery of erased or lost recollections, reworked into new images.