View of “Cibelle Cavalli Bastos,” 2016. Photo: Gui Gomes.
Cibelle Cavalli Bastos
Mendes Wood DM | São Paulo
View of “Cibelle Cavalli Bastos,” 2016. Photo: Gui Gomes.
Cibelle Cavalli Bastos’s first solo exhibition in São Paulo, “Mil Maneiras de Matar um Monstro” (A Thousand Ways to Kill a Monster), opened the night before the world’s largest LGBT parade took place in the same city. Appropriately enough, it embodied the London-based Brazilian artist’s farewell to old-fashioned gender and identity conventions.
Cavalli is a musician as well as an artist; hers was the main voice on the acclaimed 1999 album São Paulo Confessions by Suba (Mitar Subotić)—she was just twenty-one at the time it was recorded—and she has since released several albums under the name Cibelle. She’s also worked under a variety of pseudonyms such as Xanayanna Relux and Sonja Khalecallon, and while her studies were in painting, performative elements remain a constant in what she describes as a conceptual post-medium practice.
The exhibition opened onto a wall clad in
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