With his exhibition “Contos sem Reis” (Tales with No Kings), Laercio Redondo examined the history and symbols of Brazilian national identity in order to suggest not only what these exclude from official memory but also how such competing memories might have purchase on our understanding of the present. On entering the main hall of Casa Fran.a-Brasil (CFB), one first saw a scaffold-like structure built from thin wooden rods. This work, Ponto Cego (Blind Spot), 2013, nearly forty feet long and thirteen feet high, which Redondo produced with his longtime collaborator and the exhibition’s architect, Birger Lipinski, was situated at an oblique angle to the neoclassical building’s main axis. As one walked past it, the spelling of the word REVOLVER eventually emerged from the virtual volumes and planes created by the armature. In Portuguese, the word means “to turn over,” as if excavating in the ground. A sound piece that reverberated throughout the space seemed to explicate this idea: “We are the updated versions of the foolishness of buried pasts.” Redondo thus implores us to reread the present through history.

In an adjacent gallery, Venda—Jogo da memória falha (Sale—Faulty Memory Game), 2013, a work using a multilayered silk-screen process applied to nine plywood panels, presented images of street sellers by the nineteenth-century painter and printmaker Jean-Baptiste Debret on one side and Redondo’s own photographs of itinerant beach vendors on the other. One could recognize parallel gestures across the two surfaces but could not see both at once. Yet the stakes of this memory game go further: While Debret depicted the customs of African slaves in ways that reveal social relations of domination in colonial and imperial Brazil, Redondo’s documentation of corporeal posture as an expressive form suggests that similar inequalities persist today. In the same gallery stood Paisagem impressa (Printed Landscape), 2013, seventy-seven stools that when assembled form two panoramic landscapes of Rio by Debret. The top of each stool represents a segment of landscape, while a small shelf beneath each seat displays a book about Rio. Together they amount to an intimate library, gathered by the artist according to recommendations from colleagues and friends, and serve as a venue for discussions about Rio yesterday and today. In the final gallery, Carmen Miranda—Uma ópera da imagem (Carmen Miranda—An Opera of the Image), 2010, poetically evoked the iconic singer and actress. Adorned with the accoutrements of her identity (sequins, jewelry, artificial flowers and fruit), elegant mobile structures supplemented by a recorded text suggest how her image tapped into the American desire for an exotic Brazilian other—a stereotype Miranda both inhabited and undermined through the excess of her performances in the mid-twentieth century.

Miranda lived only a few blocks away from the present CFB, and the building itself once housed the city’s first chamber of commerce, where among the various “goods” for sale were, at one time, slaves. This sensitivity to the history of the space and surrounding neighborhood was crucial to the show’s force: The exhibition site was inextricably tied to the work’s critical effect. Redondo thereby offered a timely platform for reflection on the continuities and discontinuities between Rio’s present and past. Today the city government packages Rio as a modern global city ready for the Olympic Games, while debates about the effects of urban projects, including compulsory evictions and rampant gentrification, remain concealed by official images of a prosperous future. It seems that Carmen Miranda is back. Contemporary images of Rio again conceal a more complex social reality.

—Kaira M. Cabañas