Tamar Guimar es, Canoas, 2010, 16mm transferred to HD, 13', courtesy of the artist and Galeria Fortes Vila a, S o Paulo. In partnership with 18th Street Arts Center 18th Street Arts Center is an artists residency program that provokes public dialogue through contemporary art-making.
To encounter the work of Brazilian born, Copenhagen-based artist Tamar Guimar es means to pause. Her work requires slowing down, listening, and absorbing in a way that is both meditative and analytical. It is not work to take in passively, but work to grapple with over time. Guimar es' video and installation pieces require this kind of engagement, perhaps because they are produced through a similar process: a gradual research method that evolves, expands, turns, and deepens until the work is done. Guimar es references history and uses research to call into question established narratives, and to create space for new considerations and openings of understanding.
The artist recently completed a research residency at 18th Street Arts Center in preparation for a later commission to be featured in a joint exhibition between 18th Street and LACMA. A Universal History of Infamy is curated by LACMAs Pilar Tompkins Rivas, Rita Gonz lez, and Jos Luis Blondet and is a project of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, an initiative of the Getty with arts institutions across Southern California. Guimar es and her collaborator Kasper Akh j spent two months in Santa Monica this past winter, investigating linkages between their ongoing research and Los Angeles regional histories.
Tamar Guimar es, A Man Called Love, 2007/2008, slide projection with synchronized sound, 20', courtesy of the artist and Galeria Fortes Vila a, S o Paulo.
In A Man Called Love (2007-09), Guimar es delves into a unique persona in Brazilian's recent past, a well-known psychic medium called Francisco Candido Xavier. The work took two forms: first a narrated slide projection made up of archival images gathered from Brazil's national and Sao Paulo state archives (2008), and then a small book, A Man Called Love: Reading Xavier, (2010) which extended some of the ideas. Both works cover Xavier's history, the context of the country during that time, including the history of Spiritism in Brazil, and how those intersect or not with leftist resistance to state control. She uses his story as a way to explore civic and institutional consent in Brazilian civil society and beyond, during the period in his life when Xavier was most popular, the 1960s and 70s, when his vision and presence coincided with one of the most repressive military dictatorships in Brazilian history, between 1964-1985. One image of Xavier disappears into the next, disappears into images of social utopias he wrote about, disappears into visions of state violence, all under the soothing voice of a woman who slowly and clearly suggests multiple readings and questions, allowing a viewer to meditate on these musings without settling on an answer. The elusive character of communication between spirit and living person that A Man Called Love presents is paralleled by the artist's visual approach. Like the seemingly invisible authors who inhabit Xavier's writing, the ideas in Guimar es work reveal themselves through the work's layers, even if they remain as open questions.
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In a 1971 TV interview, Xavier, who was believed to have the ability to channel spirit guides from another realm, delivers a message from the most prominent of these, Emmanuel : Remember to subject yourselves to the ones in government. Be obedient and ready to assist in the good work. Did the writings of the largely white and middle class spirits like Emmanuel, calling for obedience and hard work, aid in the government's repression? How do the idealistic visions of society originally proposed by early Spiritism in Brazil and in some of Xavier's writings complicate this story? Guimar es found that her use of a slide narrative actually lent itself to her desire to avoid a single vision. The slides with sound have been a good tool for my bricolage approach to narrative, in the sense that there are various elements coming from different sources, which are often being re-written, the artist explains. The book version of the project allowed her to add to her thinking, but also question it. To further the narrative was to pursue it beyond sociological parameters, beyond suggesting that the mystic's experiences are simply symptomatic re-stagings of social structures in disarray, Guimar es clarifies. She recognized the violence involved in reducing Xavier's context and work to a set of socio-political and psychoanalytic signs, she explained in a 2014 essay in South Magazine, referring to the concern that using Xavier only as a tool to describe Brazil's social or political contradictions could overshadow acknowledgement of his alternative vision of the world which included the well-being of all human beings. Instead, she became more curious about the work being done by the Spiritist community to create a kind of freedom within their own context, regardless of what was happening politically or socially across the country.
Tamar Guimar es and Kasper Akh j, Captain Gervasio's Family, 2013/2014, cement and wood elements and 16mm film on loop sound, black and white, 17', courtesy of the artists and Galeria Fortes Vila a, S o Paulo.
This deeper investigation into the actual practices of the Spiritist community became the 2013/2014 work, Captain Gervasio's Family, a collaboration with Akh j. The short film shows members of the small town of Palmelo in the interior of Brazil, about half of whom are psychic mediums. The town grew around a study group and eventually a sanatorium, drawing psychic mediums who continue to practice a form of psychic healing calle
