Jonathas de Andrade, Brazilian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale

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Popular expressions in Brazil that use parts of the human body in metaphors such as “knot in the throat”, “paw-faced”, “eye of the hurricane”, “from the guts of the heart”, “with arms crossed”, “push with the belly”, among dozens of others, are the inspiration for the unprecedented installation With the heart coming out of the mouth, by the Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade (1982, Maceió, AL) for the Brazilian Pavilion at the 59. International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, which opens on Saturday April 23 and runs until November 27.

Considered one of the most representative Brazilian artists of his generation, Jonathas de Andrade conceived the project at the invitation of Jacopo Crivelli Visconti (also curator of the 34th Bienal – Faz escuro mas eu canto, held in 2020/2021), appointed by the Fundação Bienal as curator of the Brazilian representation in the oldest biennial in the world. "With this exhibition, we reinforce our mission of promoting Brazilian art and taking the most vibrant of our country's artistic production to the different corners of the world", explains José Olympio da Veiga Pereira, president of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.

The exhibition consists of photographic prints, sculptures (some of them interactive) and a video (commissioned by the Fondazione in Between Art Film), and has among its references the science fairs that the artist knew as a child, in particular the experience of visiting the Eva doll (a gigantic 45-meter fiber and foam doll that toured the country in the 1980s, in which the public could enter to learn about the functioning of the human body). “The way to represent Brazil, or maybe just allude to it, today, inevitably passes through the body of those who live in the skin and in the flesh, daily, the difficulties, violence and injustices that are repeated, year after year, decade after decade, century after century. A body literally and repeatedly fragmented, silenced, ignored, torn apart. But these isolated and objectified parts of the body also transcend it, by introducing the other structuring element of the exhibition: language”, says Crivelli Visconti.