Bridges over the Abyss: A Conversation with Diane Lima and Aline Motta

Basing their conversation on three films by Aline Motta, Motta and curator, Diane Lima, discuss historiographical speculation, memory, and fiction. Considering how narratives are constructed and how they are used in both artistic and curatorial practices, the conversation will expand and reflect upon the relationships between temporalities and archives and images and words.

Event will be in Portuguese with simultaneous translation to English.

Diane Lima lives between Salvador and São Paulo, Brazil. Her projects gained notoriety for broadening debates around artistic and curatorial practices from a decolonial perspective within Brazil. She holds a Master’s degree in communication and semiotics from Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC–SP). An independent curator and writer, she is part of the curatorial team for the 35th São Paulo Biennial that will take place in 2023. Lima is part of the curatorial committee for the collection of the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC-USP). In 2022, she curated Vuadora, a mid-career retrospective of artist Paulo Nazareth at Pivô in São Paulo and Antônio Obá: Path at The Oude Kerk in Amsterdam. She was one of the curators of 3rd Frestas Trienal de Artes do SESC São Paulo titled O rio é uma serpente [The River is a Snake] in 2021. Between 2016 and 2017 she was the curator of the program Absent Dialogues at Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, and in 2018 and 2019 of the Valongo International Image Festival in Santos, São Paulo. She created the radical education program AfroTranscendence and the residency program PlusAfroT at Villa Waldberta, Munich in 2015. She has presented her work at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York and New York University, and her texts have been published in The Brooklyn Rail and Foam, amongst others. She was included in Afronta!, a docu-series highlighting Afro-Brazilian creatives on Netflix. Her forthcoming book will be published later this year by Fósforo. She was awarded a Ford Foundation Global Fellowship in 2021.

Aline Motta (b. 1974, Niterói, Brazil) lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. She earned her BA in Communications at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (1995) and a Film Production Certificate at The New School, New York (2004). She has had solo exhibitions at Sesc Belezinho, São Paulo (2022); New Museum, New York (2021); and Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro (2021); among others. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (2022); Les Rencontres de la Photographie Arles (2021); Centro Cultural Kirchner, Buenos Aires (2021); Museu de Artes do Espírito Santo, Vitória (2021); Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre (2020); Museu de Arte de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis (2020); Goethe-Institut Salvador-Bahia (2020); and Museu de Arte de São Paulo (2019); among others. She received the 7th Indústria Nacional Marcantonio Vilaça Award for the Arts (2019) and the ZUM/Instituto Moreira Sales Photography Grant (2018).

Presented in conjunction with Social Fabric: Art and Activism in Contemporary Brazil. Co-organized by the Department of Art and Art History’s Art History Lecture Series and the Visual Arts Center, with support from Archiving Black América, Art Galleries at Black Studies, Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS), Humanities Institute through the Viola S. Hoffman and George W. Hoffman Lectureship in Liberal Arts and Fine Arts, LLILAS Benson Brazil Center, Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, and Texas Global.