Events/
Rosangela Renno

The Society for Contemporary Art proudly presents Ros?ngela Renn? Tuesday, December 7, 1999. in the Woman's Board Room Ros?ngela Renn? is a Brazilian artist who has gained international recognition over the last few years with her powerful installation work. Utilizing photography and text, Renn? deals directly and poignantly with often pressing social and political issues. Her work plays with memory and the issue of social amnesia, especially in her native country of Brazil. Photographs, taken from institutional archives, anonymous i.d. photos and other found sources, when collected, manipulated, enlarged and framed by Renn?, go on to have another existence in a public art context. The texts, excerpted from newspapers and magazines, refer to violence in everyday life and are usually inscribed in bas-relief on gallery or museum walls. Through her intensive research and investigation, Renn? explores and repositions the trauma of public and private events. The results are at once engaged social documents as well as speculative, poetic, even melancholic works of art. One series of work consisted of 18 photographs, taken from a S?o Paulo state penitentiary archive of roughly 15,000 glass negatives (from the 1920s to '40s), which display the back of the heads and the individual patterns of prisoners' shaved crowns or tattoo markings. Her work also makes reference to how quickly an image can fade, particularly those which were never intended to be presented in an artistic framework. This is especially true of her series O Grande Jogo da Memoria (The Great Memory Game) in which she recreates a childhood card game using photographs of missing persons. The viewer is confronted with the imperfection of both memory and photography as fragmentary and approximate experiences. Her distinguished career includes solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1996, the S?o Paulo Pavilion at the S?o Paulo Bienal and the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney in 1999. Important group exhibitions include the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale in 1997, Prospekt in Frankfurt Germany in 1996, the Museums of Modern Art in both Brazil and Rio de Janeiro in 1998 and many others. Please join us for this rare opportunity to listen and learn from one of the most promising artists working in South America today. Attendance is limited to 48, so please make your reservation early.