The Video Fortnight

Save and Continue presents an overview of contemporary Brazilian art created using computer-generated media, including AI-generated installations, virtual environments, video games, and machinima videos and films. The selection in this exhibition, however, takes a more focused approach, examining how these artistic practices challenge the notions of identity and representation — key concepts in recent movements that seek to reimagine the present formed by a colonial past. The participating artists and collectives address issues of gender, race, coloniality, and power by harnessing virtual media to shape realities that reflect Brazil’s social and historical conditions of subalternity, while simultaneously imagining new fictions about their own bodies and homeland.

Alongside its political engagement, Save and Continue also highlights the emergence of technological practices in the Global South. Despite the high costs of hardware and software and the specialized expertise required, these forms of digital media can function as decolonial counter-images produced under the inequalities of a post-capitalist system. Paradoxically, these circumstances also remind us how multinationals from the Global North use outsourcing to generate computer images cheaply by hiring small creators from Brazil and other developing from Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Similar contradictions are found in the Brazilian art scene itself: while most artists working with digital media are self-taught, they often gain recognition abroad rather than at home. In a celebration of these artists’ pioneering work, this exhibition pays homage to their resilience: as in a videogame, where “game over” implies a challenge rather than defeat, to “save and continue” is always an option that allows the player to try again, preserving the memory of their last attempt to overcome obstacles.

With: Biarritzzz, enorê, Froiid, Gabriel Massan, Jonas Van & Juno B, Simon Fernandes, Vitória Cribb.
Curated by Lucas Albuquerque