Rosângela Rennó is part of a younger generation of Brazilian women artists—Adriana Varejão, Beatriz Milhazes, Jac Leirner, and Valeska Soares—who have gained international recognition over the last few years. Among these, Rennó is perhaps the one who gives the greatest emphasis to social and political issues in her work.

In her MoCA focus series exhibition “Cicatriz” (Scar), Rennó juxtaposed two series of her work. The first is a selection from her Arquivo Universal (Universal archive, 1992–96), which consists of short texts, taken from newspapers and magazines, that refer to violence in

In the excellent anthology published to accompany “Distant Relations: A Dialogue Among Chicano, Irish, and Mexican Artists,” Mexican art historian Cuauhtémoc Medina writes that audiences expect international exhibitions “to reveal some truth about, say, . . . ‘Mexico and Ireland.’ This is an illusion; the experience of a society cannot be summarized in an object or image. . . . We visit Babel as tourists and come back with a snapshot.”

The little corner of Babel snapshotted here combines two regions that obviously share the experience of tremendous political and cultural upheaval. While other