Letícia Parente’s (Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, 1930 – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1991) artistic trajectory began only after several years of studying science, during which she received her doctorate in chemistry and developed an acknowledged professional career as a scientist, teaching and publishing essays and books. In the early 1970s, when she arrived in Rio de Janeiro from Salvador, Parente began to study printing techniques in parallel with her scientific work. Her interest in art quickly brought her in touch with a community of artists that included Anna Bella Geiger, Ana Vitória Mussi, and Sonia Andrade, among others, with whom she shared ideas and, above all, the conviction that, through art, they could find a place space that was favorable to freedom of expression amidst a repressive civil-military dictatorship (1964–85). That group experimented with several techniques, including video, thus ending up becoming a pioneer of this medium in Brazil. By making video art, which was a new technology at that time, those artists found a means to express their ideas about the political and social problems the population was going through. Letícia Parente’s work has recently been exhibited on Radical Women: Latin-American Art, 1960-1985, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Pinacoteca de São Paulo and the Brooklyn Museum in New York; Histories of Sexuality, at MASP; and Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s, at Sammlung Verbund in Vienna, among others.

This exhibition presents a selection of five representative and fundamental videos to understand Parente’s oeuvre. Counting on austere resources, the body, the house, the wardrobe, and even the projection screen frame become metaphorical spaces to express a human condition, female and socially determined to live confined under parameters established by a patriarchal, dictatorial, and restrictive system. The metaphor can be extended to the representation of a specific political situation of limited civil rights of the population, embodied by a woman’s point of view from the intimacy of her home. After the recent periods of global confinement due to the pandemic, the actions presented in those works take on new relevance and other reading perspectives.

Sala de Vídeo: Letícia Parente [Video Room: Letícia Parente] is curated by María Inés Rodríguez, adjunct curator of modern and contemporary art, MASP.