“Floating around”

“There is

no place

like

utopy

There is

in utopy

like a place”

A poet and visual artist, Lenora de Barros produces photographs, videos, installations and performances. She has held solo and group exhibitions at renowned institutions such as the Maria Antonia University Center (São Paulo), the Paço Imperial (Rio de Janeiro), the Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art, the Casa Daros (Rio de Janeiro), the Banco do Nordeste Cultural Center (Fortaleza), the Proa Foundation (Buenos Aires), the 2012 San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial, the 2011 Lyon Biennial, the 29th, 24th and 17th São Paulo Biennials, the 7th and 5th Mercosul Biennials (Porto Alegre), and the Lisbon City Museum. Her works are part of the collections of the Museu d'Art Conteporani de Barcelona, ​​Daros Latinoamerica, the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art and the São Paulo Cultural Center.

Lenora graduated in linguistics from the Faculty of Philosophy, Literature and Human Sciences of the University of São Paulo (FFLCH/USP) in the 1970s and initially explored the word in text form. She worked for important media outlets, such as "Jornal da Tarde", where, between 1993 and 1996, she wrote an experimental weekly column.

Influenced by Concretism, especially concrete poetry, her forms of expression expanded and her work with words took on other forms, entering the field of contemporary art itself. As the artist comments: “I began to try to explore language from all angles.”

In "Look for Me" (2003), the artist created a poster with four different images of herself, in a composition that makes us think of Cindy Sherman's mutations, in a game of being and not being, and spread them around Curitiba. The video shows Lenora moving around the city, with her luggage (also with the same wording) and her posters, and the reactions of people when they come across them and the artist in motion.

Ping-pong balls were first explored in her solo exhibition "Poetry is a Thing of Nothing", held in Milan in 1990. In it, the artist placed 5,000 balls on the floor of the space, next to a red velvet cushion in the center. All of the balls were engraved with the title of the exhibition. The balls were also featured in the second edition of "Arte-Cidade - A Cidade e Seus Fluxos" (1994), creating a visual and sound game. Since then, these elements have punctuated her artistic career, appearing in different forms and on different supports. In 2000, in the installation "Ping-poem for Boris", the artist expanded the field of exploration to other pieces related to them, such as rackets, nets and tables.

According to Marilia Martins, a professor at PUC-Rio and the Parque Lage School of Visual Arts: “For Lenora, the same movement of showing herself is also that of hiding herself within herself, in the many folds and intersections of language that make up her works. Lenora’s characters also move between texts, images and sounds, sometimes on parallel paths, sometimes discordant. They are just voices, or voices that conflict with the images, or with texts, scrambling perceptions and readings.”