REGINA SILVEIRA IN BARCELONA: PARADOXES, IRONIES AND CRITICAL REFLECTION

Silveira is one of the pioneers in experimenting with new technologies for technical reproduction and image circulation in Brazil. Over more than six decades, her work has focused on analyzing, critiquing, and dismantling conventional systems of representation. Since the 1970s, she has questioned and expanded the possibilities of visual perception and perspective through distortions, anamorphoses, simulacra, and paradoxes. Filled with irony and conceptual deviations, her graphic, audiovisual, performative, and three-dimensional projects comment on the past, challenge the status quo, and envision alternative realities and possible futures.

The exhibition includes a significant body of works created during Brazil’s civic-military dictatorship (1964-1985), a period marked by censorship, violence, and repression. This lesser-known part of her production resonates with contemporary times. For a long period, the creation and circulation of her work took place in alternative and marginal contexts, outside the traditional art market. Artistic exchange networks and mail art played a crucial role in her career, as did teaching and academic research.

Through optical games, shadow distortions, and interventions on images—most of them sourced from mass media and art history—Silveira draws attention to hierarchical structures and symbols of power, including the art system, institutions, and monuments. At the same time, she invites viewers to deconstruct them. As early as the 1970s, she anticipated debates on social and environmental issues by critically reflecting on the exoticized colonial imagery commonly associated with Brazil. In the 1990s, she extended this political and social critique to all of Latin America. Initially working in two dimensions, her practice gradually began to engage with the white cube, specific architectures, and public spaces, creating expanded graphics that encourage participation and alter the perception and experience of places.

In addition to her most emblematic works and series, this exhibition includes sketches and models of some of her large-scale architectural and urban interventions. A central aspect of Silveira’s trajectory is her pursuit of dialogue with shared spaces and the democratization of artistic experience. The exhibition extends beyond the gallery rooms and engages the public on Las Ramblas with an augmented reality piece installed in the courtyard of the Palau de la Virreina.

Destructuras de poder will be on view until March 30 at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Palau de la Virreina, La Rambla 99, Barcelona (Spain).