The beginning of everything

Solo exhibition by Naine Terena
Curatorial essay by Luciara Ribeiro 

Naine Terena has her first solo show at Carmo Johnson Projects, presenting a diverse set of works: masks based on weavings, photographs, installation works and videos that evoke translations, crossings and marks of indigenous memory.
 

“The beginning of everything” has a sensitive curatorial essay written by Luciara Ribeiro, educator, researcher and curator, who mentions: ”Naine Terena has made an enormous contribution to the areas of curatorship, art criticism, education and cultural-educational public management. The exhibition Véxoa, nós sabemos [Véxoa, we know], curated by Terena and shown in 2020 at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, has become a landmark in the history of the institution and the national arts, being recognized as one of the main recent exhibitions of contemporary indigenous productions. Unlike the place occupied in Véxoa, in the exhibition O começo de tudo, for the first time, the exhibition room will not be designed by Naine Terena to house works by other artists, but rather her own artistic productions. Here, she brings us closer to a side of her that is still little known, that of an artist”.

The exhibition gives us a glimpse into the beginnings of Naine's artistic production, which began in the 1990s with handicrafts and the performing arts. With these references in mind, the artist imprints both the installation distribution of the works, inspired by the encounters of the theatrical scene, and the making of the textile works, making up the following nuclei: The others; I am a tree; Brave new world and Before the world didn't exist.

Naine Terena makes a series of “Masks” (2024) using elements of the weaving technique and recodes them to create textile works that materialize the 'others' - everything that inhabits this same time-space but is not identified or goes unnoticed by human eyes. Based on weaving processes common among the Terenas. Her weaving, unlike that usually present in Terena textile handicrafts, does not seek the rigidity of the planned, the perfect, the framed and the calculated; on the contrary, it aims to highlight the notion of the imperfect, the incomplete, the insufficient, the unfinished. There are loose lines, sinuous cuts, skipped points, which incorporate the remains of objects she found during the making process, discards thrown on the ground, garbage, evidence of the contempt that today's society has practiced with the health of the earth. In “Vovó” (2024), she deepens the contact between cycles of time, between speaking of now and listening to those who came before. With the wisdom spoken by the time of the present and the time of the elders, the artist-researcher creates a granny criss-crossed with ribbons, making the dancing gesture of her fingers the firmament for the presence of an exuberant granny, with huge tentacles that lift her up at the same time as supporting her on the ground.

The “I am a tree” series is an experiment in producing a materiality of thoughts that connect humanity to everything that inhabits the animal, plant and cosmological world. Naine Terena often recalls It was a late afternoon in 2020 when I sat at the back of my house and took a photo of one of my plants. I started fiddling with it using various filters, until in one of them I saw a small smile that gave me the thought: I am a tree! [Naine Terena]

The set 'Brave new world', or 'a necessary boot', is created from a set of seven tuna cans, whose content includes images made from artificial intelligence, such as technology recognizing 'wealth', poverty in Brazil, good living. The images seem to dialogue with real-life facts, such as 'tokenism', environmental racism, private leisure venues, the impoverishment of a good portion of the population, reflecting on whether it's time for a necessary boot.

Finally, the set of videos “Before the world didn't exist” alludes to the many indigenous stories and cosmologies, using the name of the literary work written by Umusi Pãrõkumu and Tõrãmu Kehíri, indigenous people from the Amazon region, to approach the creation of the world from the indigenous perspective and its relationship with the present and future. The images on the coconut shells feature constellations, which are important to indigenous peoples, climatic actions, colors and shapes that represent the world before and the world now. The world before this world, which our old trunks taught us to live in balance, and the world today, where relationships seem to have been broken by a large part of the population.