Resonance Fields (Campos de ressonância)

Resonance Fields Traces a Historical Overview of Video Art Across the Global South

Landmark exhibition brings together more than 60 works by artists from 19 countries, drawing from the collections of Associação Cultural Videobrasil, MAC USP,  and Moscow’s GES-2 House of Culture
 

On November 7, 2026, the exhibition Resonance Fields (Campos de ressonância) opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP). Organized collaboratively by Associação Cultural Videobrasil, MAC USP, and GES-2 House of Culture, the exhibition charts the history of video art across the Global South and beyond from the 1970s to the present day, bringing together over 60 works by artists representing 19 countries.

The exhibition revisits foundational milestones of the medium in Brazil. Portable video cameras first arrived in the country during the 1970s. Under the directorship of Walter Zanini, MAC USP embraced experimental artistic practices—video prominent among them. The founding of the museum’s Video Department in 1977 transformed the institution into a vital laboratory for the production, experimentation, and circulation of the electronic image. “This suite of initiatives provided crucial momentum for the new generation that emerged in the subsequent decade,” explains Heloisa Espada, professor at MAC USP and co-curator of the exhibition.

During the 1980s, alongside Brazil’s political opening, video experienced an explosion of creativity marked by multifaceted artistic and political experimentation. Videobrasil emerged out of this fertile climate. Originally founded as a festival dedicated to audiovisual experimentation, the initiative evolved over four decades, keeping pace with shifts across the discipline and establishing itself as a core institution for the preservation, research, and dissemination of moving image practices.

Resonance Fields (Campos de ressonância) articulates two major Brazilian collections—the Videobrasil Collection, built since 1983 across successive editions of the Videobrasil Festival and Biennial, and MAC USP’s historical holdings—placing them in direct dialogue with a Soviet and Russian selection curated by GES-2 House of Culture. This body of work traces experimental film and video from 1970 to contemporary production, spanning pioneering research by the Prometheus group in Kazan, Moscow Conceptualism, late-Soviet underground scenes, and post-1991 artistic reconfigurations.

“Drawing on the convergence of diverse territories and historical contexts, the exhibition brings together artistic trajectories that forged distinct relationships with the electronic image, creating alternative pathways toward the contemporary outside the dominant circuits of North America and Western Europe,” notes the curatorial statement, jointly authored by Solange Oliveira Farkas, Alessandra Bergamaschi, and André Pitol (associate curator) from Videobrasil; Esther Hamburger and Heloísa Espada from MAC USP; and Andrei Vasilenko and Dmitry Belkin from GES-2. The curators frame the exhibition as an open-ended research proposition and an exercise in historical rewriting: a history of video art mapped through connections, gaps, and reverberations.

“By bringing the collections of Videobrasil and MAC USP into conversation, we engage two critical lineages of Brazilian video art, opening new possibilities for reading these archives,” explains Farkas. The inclusion of works originating from the other side of the globe “offers a rare encounter with a repertoire spanning decades of technological, artistic, cultural, and political transformation across distinct regions,” add Espada and Hamburger.

The dialogue with the Russian artistic production began in 2024 with the exhibition Videobrasil. Needs no translation, hosted at the GES-2 House of Culture in Moscow — a retrospective survey spanning forty years of video art and performance from the Global South.  In São Paulo, this exchange expands through the inclusion of the MAC USP historical collection and a new selection of Soviet and Russian works, establishing further connections between trajectories, contexts, and experiences of the moving image. “The new selection is neither another version of a project already realized nor a return journey of the same exhibition. Here, subjects familiar to Brazilian viewers meet the ideas that have shaped the work of Russian artists over the past forty years. What remained a remark in the margins at GES-2 becomes a full voice in the conversation in São Paulo," says Andrei Vasilenko, curator of GES-2 House of Culture and V–A–C Foundation.

The project carries sharp resonance within today’s political landscape. Amid the resurgence of authoritarian rhetoric and the weaponization of manipulated imagery for disinformation, the exhibition foregrounds video’s agency as an instrument of resistance and historical testimony.

“At a time when several Latin American countries are witnessing the resurgence of authoritarian imaginaries, and denialist discourses deploy manipulated images as tools of disinformation, these archives activate a vital critical function,” states curator Alessandra Bergamaschi. She adds: “Bringing together these collections is a way of brushing history against the grain, in the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s On the Concept of History (1940)—reading the past against the narrative of the victors, from the vantage point of what was pushed to the margins.”

Displayed alongside one another, these works reveal unexpected affinities: recurrences, divergences, and tensions capable of reframing how individual practices and broader contexts are understood. While the spatial layout follows a chronological trajectory, the exhibition is woven through four transversal thematic axes:

• Bodies, Gestures, and Action Protocols: The body stands at the core of the relationship with the camera through choreography, rule-setting, and defiance. Highlights range from Analivia Cordeiro’s pioneering M3x3 (1973)—a computer-choreographed performance conceived for two cameras and broadcast on TV Cultura— to Viktor Alimpiev's video Whose Is This Exhalation? (2008) —in which the bodily act of breathing becomes a metaphor for an attempt to build a new collectivity in the contemporary world — and to Vitória Cribb’s virtual poetics in BUGs (2022), which shifts physical embodiment to the digital avatar.
• Languages in Experimentation: Explores the audiovisual apparatus as a tool to question the visible and the speakable, featuring structural inquiries into the medium such as Julio Plaza’s Câmera obscura (1977) and Andrei Monastyrski’s Conversation with a Lamp (1985), widely considered the first work of Soviet video art.
• Television and Historical Rewritings: Gathers tactical appropriations of broadcast television and critical interventions into public narratives, confronting dominant media machines and political transitions alike. Featured works include Tadeu Jungle’s urban epic Heróis da decadên(s)ia (1987), reflecting on hollowed-out aspirations during Brazil’s re-democratization; pirate broadcasts paroding state television in Pirate Television (1990–1993) by Timur Novikov, Yuris Lesnik, and Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe; and Gia Rigvava’s You Can Rely on Me (1993), in which a television anchor channels the dizzying shift toward post-Soviet capitalism.

• Personal Narratives and Memory Work: Frames video as an essayistic medium moving between individual experience, archival materials, and collective memory. Works include 15 Filhos (1996) by Maria Oliveira and Marta Nehring, giving voice to children of militants targeted by Brazil's military dictatorship; Chilean artist Guillermo Cifuentes’s Night Lessons (1998), addressing political violence in 1980s Chile; and Argentine artist Julia Mensch’s La vida en rojo (2016–2018), tracing three generations of militant family history. The section also emphasizes video as an art of duration and collective intimacy in pieces by Rafael França (O profundo silêncio das coisas mortas, 1988), Akram Zaatari (Red Chewing Gum, 2000), and Bouchra Khalili (Vue panoramique, 2005–2006).

   

For the curatorial team, examining these cross-cultural encounters outside the North America–Western Europe axis is vital. “This work must avoid treating these productions as derivative, while also resisting the assumption that they remain inscrutable outside their native contexts. Even without literal commentary, artists’ trajectories and the poetic strategies they developed to confront sensitive themes serve as an open invitation to historical curiosity,” Bergamaschi emphasizes. “By creating a dialogue between artists from different generations, separated by 12,000 kilometres, we were able to generate greater interest in video art and explore it from different perspectives. Ambitions of this scope can only be realised through collaboration, one project at a time, one idea at a time,” notes Artem Bondarevskiy, General Director of GES-2 House of Culture and V–A–C Foundation. 

Placing works from disparate geographies alongside one another while foregrounding shared socio-political textures, the exhibition poses a central question: “How do these moments and movements resonate across different territories of the Global South?” Farkas notes. 

Alongside the primary galleries, the dedicated screening room Images and Traces (Imagens e vestígios) features four looped screening programs drawing from the Videobrasil Collection along the exhibition’s thematic lines. The space is accompanied by a historical mapping that cross-references political turning points, media and communications technologies, exhibitions, and artist collectives, alongside display cases presenting archival ephemera from MAC USP and Videobrasil. Period catalogs, photographs, and institutional documents illuminate the material and institutional conditions of production, highlighting the networks that made the circulation of these works possible.

The opening reception takes place on Saturday, November 7, starting at 6:00 PM, featuring opening remarks by the curators followed by a video projection across the exterior facade of MAC USP. A public program of panel discussions and performances will run throughout November, expanding the critical dialogues raised by the exhibition alongside participating artists and researchers.