Contesting Hybrid Notions within Brazilian Contemporary Art

Michael Asbury
Deputy director of the Research Centre for Transnational Art Identity, and Nation (TrAIN) at the University of the Arts, London

Alice Ming Wai Jim
Associate professor, Department of Art History, Concordia University

Brazilian art is commonly described as possessing an inevitable hybrid character because of the country’s multiple histories of settlement, colonisation and immigration. The consequence of this attributed hybridity is a problematic, albeit implicit, ambivalence in relation to canonical genealogies of art. By equating the ambivalence that hybridity purports with the notions of contamination and quarantine, it is possible to trace how the critical discourse that accompanies the art from that region has evolved. Over time, it has shifted from one that stresses identitarian strategies of definition to one that underlines distinction from the canon. If hybridity used to simply describe conditions of production marked by multiple influences, the term now carries an ethical and aesthetic value: it has become the signifier of authenticity.

A lecture by Dr. Michael Asbury, deputy director of the Research Centre for Transnational Art Identity, and Nation (TrAIN) at the University of the Arts, London, will be commented by Dr. Alice Ming Wai Jim, Concordia University, Department of Art History, associate professor. This second event questions the identity of art that is located at the crossroads of tendencies and influences.