It’s a busy year for Rosângela Rennó: One of the two artists representing Brazil at the Venice Biennale (along with Beatriz Milhazes), she’s following up a recent survey at the Museu de Arte da Pampulha in Belo Horizonte with this even larger one, curated by Adriano Pedrosa and presenting some seventy works from the late ’80s to the present. In contrast to the playful sensuality typical of other well-known Brazilian artists of her generation, Rennó’s explorations of the “universal archive” (to borrow her title for an ongoing series of works) of institutional photography and journalistic anecdote suggest a heavier, more mournful sensibility that recalls Christian Boltanski. For her, “the ‘stories of the losers’ are more interesting than the ‘history of the winners.’”
