São Paulo Biennial takes a pointed look at Brazil now

As the rightwing Bolsonaro government stokes divisions, São Paulo’s Biennial offers a pointedly diverse and inclusive programme, including sculptures by a late dub reggae legend

When fire devastated the National Museum in Brazil in 2018, one of the few objects to be found intact among the smouldering ruins was the St Luisa meteorite. While the Rio de Janeiro museum is still being rebuilt, the black rock, around a metre in length, is the star exhibit of the São Paulo Biennial, which opened this month.

The exhibition, now in its 70th year, is the second oldest of its kind. After the Venice Biennale, it is regarded as one of the most important events in the art world calendar. The curator of the show, Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, says the rock represents a sombre political moment in Brazil with the increasingly embattled far-right president Jair Bolsonaro stoking culture wars in the face of possible impeachment and plummeting popularity.

“The fire at the museum symbolised the attack on culture by this government and governments before it. The museum was long in a state of slow collapse. It was important to have objects from the museum in the show because they are tragic, but also represent resilience. The temperature of the museum fire was nothing compared to the heat the meteorite went through to enter the Earth’s atmosphere.”

Taking inspiration from the rock are a whole series of works spread across the biennial pavilion in São Paulo’s Ibirapuera Park that talk of both trauma and resistance. The dub pioneer Lee “Scratch” Perry, who died a few days before the show, was a notable inclusion. His half-dozen collages and sculptural assemblages include references to Obeah – the spiritual practice developed by enslaved west Africans in the Caribbean – and Christianity, a comment on the role of European missionaries in colonialism. Mauro Restiffe shows two series of photographs, which contrast the inauguration day of former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2003 with Bolsonaro’s supporters celebrating the day the current president entered office. The first the artist has titled simply Inauguration, the second Unspeakable.

“The show also amounts to a very clear gesture of solidarity with the indigenous people of this land,” Crivelli says. A sound piece by Sueli Maxakali relays the traditional chants of the Tikmu’un people. A series of photographs by queer performer Uyra, who is of Munduruku descent, see the artist almost camouflage to the forest behind them, their face painted and wearing costume made from the surrounding