Exhibition view, Com o coração saindo pela boca, 59th Venice Biennale, Italy (2022). Photo © Ding Musa / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.
Com o coração saindo pela boca
With the heart coming out of the mouth
Com o coração saindo pela boca [with the heart coming out of the mouth] is Jonathas de Andrade’s most recent project, which presents a group of sculptures, photographs and a video departing from an extensive collection of popular expressions in Brazil that use parts of the human body in metaphors such as entrar por um ouvido e sair pelo outro [goes into one ear and out the other], bunda mole [soft bottom] and pagar com a língua [pay with the tongue]. The expressions and their literal images play with the absurd and try to give shape to the astonishment that is to currently live in Brazil and in the world, in several instances—personal, affective, identitarian, environmental, and political.
One of the main works in the series is the namesake installation Com o coração saindo pela boca [with the heart coming out of the mouth], which consists of a giant balloon that, from time to time, inflates while coming out of a mouth, and that can occupy the entire space, forcing the public to look for escape routes.
Exhibition view, Com o coração saindo pela boca, 59th Venice Biennale, Italy (2022). Photo © Ding Musa / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo / Nara Roesler / Galleria Continua.
“This title comes from an expression popularly used when one is facing a feeling of vertigo about what is happening, or with the imminence of something intense or serious that is about to happen. That speaks to me about the present. I realized that the language used in Brazil has hundreds of expressions that make use of the body to explain specific sensations and feelings, within an idea of absurdity.”
Exhibition view, Com o coração saindo pela boca, 59th Venice Biennale, Italy (2022). Photo © Ding Musa / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.
In this series Jonathas de Andrade plays with popular culture and language, creating allegories to address Brazil and the world’s current moment, through a collective symbolic body. In this installation, the artist reinforces recurrent elements of his trajectory: the poetics and power of ambiguity, the strength of language as resistance, the boundaries between documentary and fiction, the emphasis on collaboration, the archive, the trigger of sexuality to discuss culture, and, allegories and poetic narratives as potent tools of questioning relations of power and domination.
Exhibition view, Com o coração saindo pela boca, 59th Venice Biennale, Italy (2022). Photo © Ding Musa / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.
Exhibition view, Com o coração saindo pela boca, 59th Venice Biennale, Italy (2022). Photo © Ding Musa / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.
Exhibition view, Com o coração saindo pela boca, 59th Venice Biennale, Italy (2022). Photo © Ding Musa / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo / Nara Roesler / Galleria Continua.