November 4–9, 2014
MOVE! Plasticity in celebration of 35 years of Melissa is a unique art event that brings together several collaborative participatory art installations which invite the audience to experience exciting and engaging incarnations of the plastic arts — creativity, identity, movement, performance, expression and glamour. MOVE! Plasticity features 5 movements by renowned artists for a one-week-long interactive art and fashion event, each of which plays with the overlap of the plastic arts and the plastic self. Transportation, transcendence, transformation — change is only the beginning.
ROB PRUITT, one of the most clever and inventive artists of his generation, loves to play with our aesthetic and moral expectations of what art and artists are “supposed” to do. Injecting his work with a sense of fun and guilty pleasure, Pruitt created an audience favorite with his “virtual runway” for MOVE! 2013 at SESC Belenzinho; and he has topped himself this year by allowing guests to transform more fully, picking both location and footwear. Guests inject themselves in fantastic hyper-lapses of city streets from around the world via a green-screen treadmill, and also choose from a wide variety of different “gaits”— courtesy of a range of Melissa heels. A viewer can strut down a Paris street in high heels, or pad along a jungle path in flats.
RYAN McNAMARA, “the clown prince of downtown’s thriving performance art scene” by the New York Times, goes to great lengths to use intriguing ways to engage and involve the audience, whether in using the traditional trappings of classic theater sets or the still-evolving machinery of social media and crowd-sourcing. For MOVE!, the New-York-based performer has re-envisioned a kick line of lovely legs that recalls the glory days of Hollywood musicals and exotic nightclubs. Partly an innovative way to celebrate the cultures of Melisseras – the ever-avid fans of Melissa shoes that have made the shoes one of the world’s great col- lectibles, and partly a way to elevate the legs (and shoes) to a new eye-level, McNamara’s installation also conveys a delirious and surreal sense of happiness.
ELI SUDBRACK has for nearly 20 years dazzled and fascinated viewers with his cartoonishly lush and seductive murals. That sense of fantasy and escapism is amplified consider- ably – and physically -- with his installation for MOVE! Plasticity. Working with the futuristic plastic-molding machinery at Melissa, Sudbrack invites guests to take off their shoes and relax in one of the many hammocks instead of the usual exhausting art activities of standing and walking and looking. On the ceiling, Sudbrack’s slow-moving psychedelic images drift and morph and swirl — making the escape complete.
VALESKA SOARES in collaboration with KREEMART The moment the idea of plasticity entered the conversation in planning this year’s MOVE! event, the witty work of Brazilian artist Valeska Soares shot to the top of the list. Born and raised in Bela Horizonte, Soares is known for work that investigates the no man’s land between art and the everyday mean- ing and beauty we encounter in domestic objects like books and furniture. In 2013 Soares created a performance piece, “Push Pull,” that was among the most poetic, most graphic, and most delicious illustrations of plasticity ever offered up by an artist. For MOVE!, she has updated and expanded it. Four performers trained in the curious culinary art of pushing, pulling, and kneading the simple, humble children’s treat known as taffy take on the task of transforming a solid, 12-kg block of it into something more liquid – something elastic, sticky, joyous and sculptural, an in-between medium that is forever in the process of becoming – but never what it was, and not what it will be.
BANZAI STUDIO Nowhere is the idea of human plasticity so evident than in the ways in which, without even consciously thinking about it, we come to inhabit our online personas. The art/design collective Banzai studio knows this better than anyone, having channeled human identity and desire into everything from the tangible (fashion and graffiti) to the in- tangible (video and technology). For MOVE!, Banzai have developed an astonishing work that fuses art and technology, allowing guests to meld their own conscious or unconscious body language with abstract visions and patterns, translating their own identities into a 3-D semi-abstract artwork, and taking the trend in customization to a new level of imagination.
Executive Producer Antonio Haslauer
MOVE!
November 4–9, 2014
SÃO PAULO BIENNIAL
AV. PEDRO ÁLVARES CABRAL, SÃO PAULO