Regina Vater (Rio de Janeiro, 1943) is one of Brazil’s pioneering video artists. After studying painting in Rio in the 1960s, she was invited to film a theatre play in 1974, while she was living in Paris. This was her first experience with video. Since then, she has done most of her work in this media, whether it be audiovisual installations, recordings of happenings or performances. In this exhibition, we present three pieces of the artist’s work from the 1970s.
Conselhos de uma lagarta [Advice from a Caterpillar] (1976) is a two-channel video installation. The first one is composed mainly by images of Vater’s face, recorded over months in the same place in her home between everyday activities. “Whenever I remembered the camera, I would rush in front of it and film myself, my premise was to try to let the camera surprise me,” she explained. The audio intersperses a distinct sound cadence with a narration based on passages from the book Alice in Wonderland. In passages of the classic novel by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), Alice and the Caterpillar talk about the difficulty of expressing in words the fear of the passage of time and the transformations of the body. On the opposite side, the second video brings a silent sequence of close-ups of various people gazing, including the artist Lygia Clark (1920-1988) and the poet Wally Salomão (1943-2003). The video was conceived based on the phrase “Your eye is my mirror,” which the artist heard from Clark. In the words of Vater it means: “I am what you allow me to be, by the way that you see me.” The work is a reflection, through the use of portraits and self-portraits, about the way in which our image is constructed through a complex interplay of perception and mirroring through the other — whether that be through the other character in the video or the viewer of the video as the other. Nowadays the two projections facing each other in the installation allude us on how we communicate (and see ourselves) regularly through a computer or on our cell phones when making calls by video platforms.
Two other works are exhibited on two screens outside the room: Video ART and ARTropophagy (both from 1978). In these videos, Vater appears writing the word “ART” in the sand on a beach or ingesting and blowing the same word into a balloon. In this manner, Regina Vater reaffirms the experimental and ephemeral nature of artistic materiality, a typical concern of the so-called conceptual art of the 1970s. The videos also express her incessant desire to achieve a certain “re-enchantment of the world” through her pieces, pointing to the non-rational, speculative, magical, and performative potential of art over the reality of life.
CURATED BY Guilherme Giufrida, assistant curator, MASP
In 2021-22, the Video Room program is part of the Brazilian Histories cycle at MASP, and includes works by Ana Pi, Teto Preto, Regina Vater, Zahy Guajajara and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.