Opening on 6 September 2014 (Preview: 1-5 September), the 31st Bienal de São Paulo is curated by Charles Esche, Galit Eilat, Nuria Enguita Mayo, Pablo Lafuente and Oren Sagiv with associate curators Benjamin Seroussi and Luiza Proença. The title "How to (...) things that don’t exist" is a poetic invocation of art’s capacities and its ability to reflect and act upon life, power and belief. The sentence has a variable formula in which the verbs constantly change, anticipating the actions that might make present in contemporary life the things that don’t exist, are not recognized, or have not yet been invented.
Included are 81 projects and more than 100 participants, totalling around 250 artworks. The focus of the 31st Bienal is on contemporary conditions and how art projects can engage with and activate histories, individuals and communities today. The Bienal was shaped by a series of talks in different open meetings organized by the curatorial team across Brazil and other cities in Latin America and the world.
The use of the word ‘project’ is intended to create a distance from the traditional idea of an autonomous artwork made in a studio by an artist. By using this word, it is possible to introduce a broader range of contemporary cultural practices and include people working in other disciplines, such as educators, sociologists, architects, performers. The term also serves to encourage collaboration and trans-disciplinary ways of working amongst the Bienal participants. Each project is an independent contribution, but may consist of many artworks by individual or collective authorship. More than half the projects have been made specifically for this Bienal, many by international artists who have produced work in response to a residency in the city and the opportunity to travel further in Brazil.
