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Jonathas de Andrade

The Future Generation Art Prize 2012 Special Prize Winner

Jonathas de Andrade was born in 1982 in Maceió and lives and works in Recife, Brazil. De Andrade’s work has been commissioned for significant group exhibitions including the 29th Biennial of São Paulo (2010), the Sharjah Biennial 10 (2011), the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011) and The Ungovernables, New Museum Triennial, New York (2012).

Jonathas de Andrade researches decaying systems and waning ideologies, reconstructing them through various means of documentation and archiving. From this process he develops conceptual installations that reflect on forms of cultural amnesia in which social, political, cultural and ideological issues vanish from the collective memory. A key focus for de Andrade is the now obsolete “tropical modernism”, the architectural translation of a failed system aimed to establish social equality.

Watch the works and the video profile of the artist

For the PinchukArtCentre de Andrade has created a new work based in his exploration of tropical modernism. He has taken a decayed tile wall from a typically modernist house to build a conceptual installation that reflects on this forgotten ideology and follows the question if this wall is an original modernist design or a period copy after the fashions of a later day.

“The jury awards a special prize to Jonathas de Andrade for the way he fills the blank between art and ideology. Tracing back to modernist motifs used in the architectural and mural traditions of Brazil which risk vanishing from the collective memory, his conceptual installations translate and reveal the contradiction between poverty and prosperity and failed attempts of social changes.”