Rivane Neuenschwander

Rivane Neuenschwander was born in 1967 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and lives and works in São Paulo. Her interdisciplinary practice encompasses installation, painting, drawing, photography, film, textiles, and participatory projects. Working with simple and often ephemeral materials, she transforms observations of everyday life into situations that explore language, time, geography, nature, social interaction, and the relationship between chance and control. Her work is informed by the legacy of Brazil’s postwar avant-garde, including Neo-Concrete and Tropicália, while also drawing on popular culture, literature, psychoanalysis, politics, and philosophy. A recurring characteristic of Neuenschwander’s practice is her attention to small, fleeting, and seemingly insignificant events. Ants, dust, flowers, water, soap, food, maps, and other fragile materials become vehicles for examining processes of transformation and the passage of time. Her early works often focused on mapping and geography, questioning the stability of borders and systems of representation. In works such as *Contingent* (2008) and *Pangaea’s Diaries* (2008), for example, continents made from honey and beef carpaccio are gradually consumed by ants, transforming geographical representation into a temporary and unstable image. Participation and collective action have become fundamental to many of her projects. Neuenschwander frequently creates situations in which the viewer is not simply an observer but an active participant, introducing chance, movement, conversation, and collaboration into the work. This approach is evident in projects such as *Eu Desejo o Seu Desejo* (*I Wish Your Wish*, 2003), which draws on the tradition of Brazilian wish ribbons, and in more recent installations involving workshops and collective production. The participatory dimension of her practice allows individual experiences to become part of larger social and imaginative structures. Nature and ecological questions have also become increasingly important in Neuenschwander’s work. Her film *Eu Sou uma Arara* (*I Am a Macaw*, 2022), produced in collaboration with filmmaker Mariana Lacerda, addresses the impact of deforestation in the Amazon and its consequences for Indigenous peoples. The project emerged from a longer period of research and from a series of actions in São Paulo involving figures inspired by Brazilian flora and fauna. Rather than treating nature as a passive subject, the work connects ecological transformation with political and social questions, bringing together environmental crisis, collective memory, popular culture, and forms of resistance. Her recent projects have continued to combine political engagement with experimentation and collective processes. *Brasil de susto e sonho*, presented at Itaú Cultural in São Paulo in 2025, brought together more than three decades of her practice, including works addressing dreams, fear, Brazilian political history, racism, the environmental crisis, and the possibilities of collective imagination. The exhibition included *Dream.lab*, a participatory installation developed through workshops with children, in which drawings and discussions about dreams became part of the work itself. Neuenschwander has presented her work internationally in major solo and group exhibitions. In 2010, the New Museum in New York organised the mid-career survey *A Day Like Any Other*, which subsequently travelled to the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the Miami Art Museum, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. Other important solo exhibitions include presentations at Walker Art Center, Palais de Tokyo, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Malmö Konsthall, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Kinder Kunst Labor in St. Pölten, and Instituto Inhotim. In 2013, Neuenschwander received the Yanghyun Prize in South Korea, and in 2004 she was shortlisted for the Hugo Boss Prize at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Her work is held in major international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate, Centre Pompidou, the Walker Art Center, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Instituto Inhotim, and other public and private collections. Across her varied practice, Neuenschwander continues to investigate the unstable relationships between the individual and the collective, nature and culture, chance and structure, and the everyday and the political. By working with fragile materials, participatory situations, images, language, and processes of transformation, she turns apparently ordinary events into complex reflections on time, memory, social relations, and the possibility of imagining different forms of collective life.