TEXTS
Artist video: The Stories of Brazil by Gustavo Von Ha
Larissa Macêdo
SELECT Magazine
VON HA opens a pop-up to sell artworks and special editions
Find out more at the website: https://www.von-ha.com/
MAPA DAS ARTES
BRAZILIAN WAX – AN IMMERSIVE AND ABRASIVE EXPERIENCE AT A CROSSROADS OF WORLDS
Ana Avelar
critic and curator
Luise Malmaceda
Harper's Bazaar Art, 2015
MAC USP account was not hacked; understand the case
Last Thursday (the 5th), the Instagram profile of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC-USP) was taken over by a nine-panel montage featuring images of the famous sculpture Venus of Willendorf and the singer Michael Jackson (1958–2009).
Tatiane de Assis
Revista Veja 06/05/2021
Heist Films Entertainment Exhibition
Heist Films Entertainment, in addition to being the title of this exhibition, is the name of a film production company created by Gustavo von Ha to develop and distribute trailers for films that will never be made. TokyoShow [The Search for Love], Gasoline 1 [Hollywood in Flames 1], Gasoline 2 – Back to the fire [Hollywood in Flames 2] and Paranormal [Garota Diabólica] have advertising pieces, professional actors and actresses, pages on the Internet and in social networks, DVDs distributed on pirated film stands and posters (...)
Tomás Toledo
curator
Ana Gonçalves Magalhães
MAC-USP curator
Artist nominated for the PIPA Award 2017
Artist nominated for the PIPA Award 2015
Ana Avelar
critic and curator
THE FINDINGS OF SARACVRA
Artist Gustavo von Ha was invited to hold a solo exhibition at Espaço Saracvra, located at Cais do Valongo. During one of the visits, as we walked through the rooms of the townhouse, Gustavo noticed that a staircase led to an abandoned area which, during the renovation, had not been restored due to lack of funds. He realized that the walls of this place were bulging, as if they contained some kind of filling. (…)
Ana Avelar
critic and curator
GUSTAVO VON HA’S QUIXOTE
When, 103 years ago, Marcel Duchamp, alone in his studio in Paris on Rue Saint-Hippolyte[1], constructed an object composed of a wooden stool and an inverted front bicycle wheel, he had no idea of the impact his object would have on the art of the 20th and 21st centuries. Two years later, he called this category of objects ready-mades.
Sergio Romagnolo
plastic artist
Sergio Romagnolo
plastic artist
The Allegory of Contamination
Art can be seen as an equation with several different components, one of which is allegory. Artists can downgrade some elements of this equation and highlight others. Works of art almost always have all the elements, what changes from work to work is which element is prioritized. (...)
Sergio Romagnolo
plastic artist
IT’S ALL TRUE!
At the end of the 18th century, while the French Revolution was taking shape in France, hundreds of slave ships were arriving in Brazil. This dichotomy is still present today, since it is easier to find Brazilian textbooks and school programs related to the French Revolution than to slavery or Indigenous culture.
Paula Borghi
critic and curator
PHOTOGRAPHY AND AURA
Even in major exhibitions like these, photographs still seem to be considered less important than painting. At the Getty and in almost all museums, they are always displayed in the basement, “protected from the light.” But is that the real reason? Or is their easily reproducible nature considered inferior? Aura is related to authenticity, the unique existence of a work of art. Therefore, theoretically, it does not exist in a reproduction. But considering that photography captures a moment that can no longer be reached beyond that “click,” photography is, according to philosopher Walter Benjamin, the last instance of aura surrounding an image.
Gustavo von Ha
THE ARTIST TODAY
MAC USP hosts an exhibition that shakes the myth of the great masters and the conservatism of the art system as it is still configured today.
The Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo holds the most important collection of modern and contemporary art, both national and international, in the country, while also serving as a center for academic training and research. It is therefore only natural that alongside the exhibition of the museum’s permanent collection, the “retrospective” of Gustavo von Ha, “Inventory; Other Art,” is on view.
Paula Alzugaray, critic and curator
IstoÉ Magazine, September 23, 2016 – Issue 344
REENACTMENT IN PHOTOGRAPHY
Artist Gustavo Von Ha writes about “Encore Reenactment in Contemporary Photography” and Oscar Rejlander at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
ARTE! BRASILEIROS Magazine
August 7, 2019
Gustavo von Ha
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART of the University of São Paulo
Book COLLECTION: OTHER APPROACHES • VOL. IV
Torquato NETO and Waly SALOMÃO
Teresina, 1944 – Rio de Janeiro, 1972
Jequié, 1943 – Rio de Janeiro, 2003
“Oh, my honey baby
Baby, honey baby
Oh, my honey baby
Honey baby, honey baby, ah”
Above, an excerpt from Vapor Barato, by Jards Macalé and Waly Salomão.
The reciter gives voice to the author of the poem. As in music, rhythm and tone are of great importance to the existence of a poem. Poets Torquato Neto and Waly Salomão released in 1974 the only issue of Navilouca, a poetry magazine that became a landmark of Brazilian counterculture and which MAC USP holds in its collection. (…)
Gustavo von Ha
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART of the University of São Paulo
Book COLLECTION: OTHER APPROACHES • VOL. IV
José LEONILSON and Albert HIEN
Fortaleza, 1957 – São Paulo, 1993
Munich, 1956
The context for reflection is already proposed in the very title of this work, How to Rebuild at Least One Eighth of the World, which is constantly modified with each installation, since it is reconstructed every time it is mounted. This reconstruction goes beyond the title; it is embedded in the physical constitution of the work itself. The transitional, and somewhat precarious, state of this work can also be discussed in light of the museum’s collection.
Gustavo von Ha
FAVORITE SECRETS AND SINCERE LIES
Marcia Tiburi, Gustavo Von Ha, José Rufino, and Ricardo Lísias respond to the question posed by #select32
The Heist Films Entertainment Project consists of the invention of a fictitious company to create trailers for films that do not exist, with the aim of discussing limits between reality and fiction, image production mechanisms, cultural industry, instant celebrity and intellectual property.
Gustavo von Ha
TUPY OR NOT TUPY THAT IS THE QUESTION
Tarsila do Amaral exhibition at MoMA and the idea that Brazilian modernism should be understood through its own history and from an independent perspective
ARTE! BRASILEIROS Magazine
March 27, 2018
Gustavo von Ha
MY DOUBLE
Copying is important in order to tell a story different from the narratives created throughout history, touching on the question of artistic identity.
Gustavo von Ha
Historically, art has its roots in faith. It was connected to mystical issues, and its symbolic representation was a means of linking the earthly to the ethereal. To demystify art and the very role of the artist today means to clarify what is at stake in a world where reality has been replaced by narratives and images, not always grounded in truth as we know it.
Projeto T. L
Revista Bravo!, 2012
How to Transform Copies into Originals
Even though controversial, Von Ha's “original copies” were endorsed by the families of the two artists, responsible for their estates, but all sales must be reported. Paradoxically, all drawings copied by the artist must be cataloged with the Lenilson Project or Tarsila do Amaral's family.
by Paula Alzugaray
ISTOÉ | VISUAL ARTS | Edition No.: 2221 | 01.Jun.12
Double Crossing
Reflections and mirrorings are recurring subjects in my work; in this way, I deepened my investigation through certain instruments that were widely used by artists from the Renaissance onward, such as the camera lucida, as well as copying through projections using concave mirrors and the camera obscura. The appropriation of images becomes an unavoidable issue when working with reflections.
THE TWO FACES OF REFLECTION
Von Ha's work transforms space into a spectacle, and the installation surpasses contemplation, immersed in reflective and convex images that expand the limitations of what is possible to see in contemporary art—much like the transient relationship between art and society. His work suggests an openness to movement, allowing the emergence of new mechanisms of aesthetic perception, such as the fragmentation of contemporary culture, for example. Through various variations of fragments of the real world, the artist propels the viewer towards multiple simultaneous focal points, thus giving shape to an external force, the “shadow of the other,” the illusion of reality… and the work settles there, in the moment of its own visions. (...)
Cristina Burlamaqui
Curator
Gustavo von Ha appropriates cinema clichés in a new work
One of the most inventive Brazilian artists, Gustavo von Ha, 34, from São Paulo, has never shied away from appropriating and reinterpreting other people's works to give life to his authorial streak. Among his most praised works is, for example, the distorted prints of canvases by Tarsila do Amaral and Leonilson, which could be appreciated in their original form only when viewed through spheres glued to the images.
Rodrigo Levino
Veja Magazine 02/12/2011
DOUBLE CROSSING
Making off and interview
Tóquio, 2011
ART! BRAZILIANS
