Serigrafistas Queer: Freedom for Sensibilities Exposition collective

MASP - Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand presents the exhibition Serigrafistas Queer: Freedom for Sensibilities. This is the first monographic exhibition of the Argentinean collective, which was created in 2007 during a workshop to teach activists how to print T-shirts for the LGBTQIA+ Pride event in Buenos Aires. The exhibition opens to the public with 56 serigraphs from the MASP collection, as well as new works created specifically for the exhibition. The number of works will increase as a result of free public workshops that will be held in the exhibition space starting in January.

Curated by Amanda Carneiro, curator at MASP, the exhibition will address relevant themes in the trajectory of Serigrafistas Queer, such as the struggle for reproductive rights and autonomy over the body, addressing the HIV crisis from a political perspective, and embracing diverse affections and identities.

“The collective’s serigraphs are created in the context of street activism, protests, and community workshops, making the documentation and preservation of these works an act of resistance in itself. By bringing into MASP practices made by and for the street, the exhibition questions the boundaries between art and activism, public and private space, and the roles of the artist and the viewer,” says Amanda Carneiro, curator of MASP.

The exhibition is divided into seven thematic sections, named after works by the group. The work Liberdade para as sensibilidades  [Freedom for Sensibilities] – created by the Argentinian artist Mariela Cantú in 2018, during a workshop promoted by the group in the free span at the invitation of MASP – is the name of the exhibition. Corpo traesnho (a misspelling of “corpo traesnho,” or “foreign body”) is also part of this section and was produced by Matheusa Passarelli (1997-2018) in the same workshop, months before the visual arts student was brutally murdered in Rio de Janeiro after leaving a party. The inversion of the letters in the silkscreen proposes a game of alterity and identification that is crucial to the experience of trans and non-binary people.

Serigrafistas Queer: Freedom for Sensibilities is part of MASP’s annual program dedicated to the Histories of LGBTQIA+ diversity. This year’s program also includes exhibitions by Gran Fury, Francis Bacon, Mário de Andrade, MASP Renner, Catherine Opie, Lia D Castro, and the large group exhibition LGBTQIA+ Histories.