Mercosul Biennial

The 9th Bienal do Mercosul | Porto Alegre takes place from September 13 to November 10, 2013, in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil. It consists of an exhibition of contemporary art, including performances and events of various kinds, presented in different venues across the city. Its pedagogical program, Cloud Formations, started on May 17, 2013, along with special public programs and film screenings.

The 9th Bienal is organized by the Fundação Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul, a nonprofit institution in Porto Alegre with the mission of developing cultural and educational visual arts projects to encourage dialogue amongst diverse communities. The title of this ninth edition of the Bienal is, in Portuguese, Se o clima for favorável; in Spanish, Si el tiempo lo permite; in English, Weather Permitting. These titles are an invitation to ponder when and how, by whom and why, certain artworks and ideas gain or lack visibility at a given moment in time.

The promises of the 9th Bienal do Mercosul | Porto Alegre are to identify, propose and repurpose changing belief systems and appraisals of experimentation and innovation. It intends to raise ontological and technological questions through artistic practice, object making and nodes of experience. This edition of the Bienal can be considered an environment in which to encounter natural resources and material culture in a new light, and to speculate on the bases that have marked distinctions between discovery and invention, as well as the values of both sustainability and entropy.

To achieve this, the 9th Bienal brings together visual art and other kinds of contributions to address the meeting points of nature and culture. It gathers works together that explore different kinds of atmospheric disturbances propelling travel and social displacement, technological advancement and world development, vertical expansions in space, and transversal explorations through time. This project involves looking at the affections these movements provoke, and the affects that manifest themselves. It entails dwelling, mining, investigating and exploring what is below and above the social realm—what is palpable and tenuous, what is undersea and in the atmosphere, what is underground and in outer space.