Who: Maureen Bisilliat, an Anglo-Brazilian photographer.
What: Career retrospective of photography, curated by the artist.
Where: Instituto Moreiro Salles, R. Marqûes São Vicente 476, Gávea, Rio de Janeiro.
When: 8 October 2009–17 January 2010.
About the exhibit: Bisilliat curated and installed the assembly of works in the show, devoting one room or hallway to a major body of work. The installation is impeccable—the walls are painted dark, sumptuous colors that complement the colors in the color work, and set off the black and white photography. Much of the artist’s work has been inspired by her desire to understand more deeply the greatest works of Brazilian literature. Bisilliat pursued this inspiration by photographing the people, cultures and places that were the sources and backdrops to major novels and poems of such authors as Euclides de Cunha and João Guimarães Rosa.
By placing quotations from the relevant works and folkloric art from the respective region on the wall with her photos, arranging them in a sort of spatial page layout, the artist reflects her many years of working as a magazine photo-essayist. In the center of each room stands a vitrine with the books and periodicals devoted to the particular series. The photos work as well blown up to the A1 or A0 format for the exhibit as they must have worked on the page in first publication. The installation successfully reproduces the intimate and reflective experience of reading and viewing a photo-essay in a luxury magazine or coffee-table book in the large-scale physical space of a museum exhibit.
Bisilliat works as a classic documentary photographer, spending much time in the field developing a rapport with her subjects in order to portray their personal character. Her work reveals a sympathetic orientation towards her subjects, which allowed her to record the daily life and traditions that would begin to disappear in future decades as communications technology expanded and as people began to travel more frequently between their rural homelands and the big cities of Brazil that provided economic opportunity.
