Lenora de Barros: To See Aloud

To See Aloud encompasses various facets of her artistic practice - from early text works, videotext poems, publications and printed matter, to photographs, objects, object poems and installations, to her most recent performances and public artworks, including sound-based and collective activations. De Barros expands our understanding and experience of language by bringing the "verbivocovisual" approach into the 21st century. "Verbivocovisual" is a neologism coined by James Joyce and later used by Concrete Poetry. Lenora de Barros describes the term as the leitmotif of her work, exploring the interplay between the verbal, vocal and visual on different levels, subverting any hierarchy or restriction. "I literally decided to go out of the space of the page to break into the free space" (de Barros, 2018).

The exhibition is also conceived as a network of different thematic spaces (library, kaleidoscope, labyrinth or radio station) that invite visitors to a multi-sensory, non-linear and participatory experience and dissolve the boundaries between art and poetry. To See Aloud shows a variety of works from the 1970s to the present day, including such central works as Poema (Poem) from 1979 - photographed by Fabiana de Barros - as a love story between language and the tongue, or ONDE SE VÊ (Where you can see) from 1982 with visual poems in the form of early video texts. The video texts are reactivated for the first time in their original technique. Mínimo Som Mínimo (minimum sound) embodies the attempt to approach a primal sound through the repetition of a fragment, a sound splinter, and was realized in 1983 as a visual poem and later as a sound performance. Ping-Poema is the title of a series of works from the 1990s consisting of object poems, sound installations and photo performances, in which the table tennis ball becomes the carrier and sound interpreter of texts. Later works incorporate other elements of the game such as rackets and plates, thus entering into a dialog with Russian Constructivism.

The photo and video performance NÃO QUERO NEM VER (I DON'T WANT TO SEE NOTHING, 2005) is an approach to female subjectivity and at the same time takes a critical look at stereotypical female activities such as knitting. The library section of the exhibition contains publications and texts by Lenora de Barros as well as rare printed matter and catalogs on the context of Brazilian concrete poetry with the Noigandres group as a pioneering collective, which also influenced de Barros' artistic practice at an early stage - alongside other concrete and intermedia artists from the second half of the 20th century.