Sabrina Moura: Decenterings and Regionalisms

The Third World (1965),
Wifredo Lam, oil on canvas, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana

Decenterings and Regionalisms: An Intercrossed History of the Havana and Dakar Biennials

This research intends to investigate the role of two strategic projects in the visual arts field – the biennials of Havana (1984) and Dakar (1990/92) – in view of political, intellectual and cultural exchange between Africa and Latin America during the 1980s and 2000s. These exhibition platforms are discussed with regard to their programs, agents and discourses, and reviewed in light of the recent contributions from the history of exhibitions to the discipline of Art History, from a non-European perspective. In order to map and confront their historical and social insertion modalities, I make use of the notion of Histoire Croisée, put forth by Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, as a methodological tool in the field of relational theories. This premise enables a broader contextualization of the exhibition platforms at hand, putting in perspective the emancipatory projects carried out by the non-aligned countries during the Cold War, the emergence of the notions of pan-Africanism and blackness in the Senegalese context, and Cuba’s anti-imperialistic ideology and cultural policies outlined between the 1950s and the 80s. In addition, it is worth noting that this research is underpinned by a set of perspectives that converse with the fields of anthropology of art, sociology of culture and political geography.

Sabrina Moura is a researcher, curator and editor based in São Paulo, Brazil. She is currently a PhD candidate at the History Department of the University of Campinas. Sabrina received her MA in Art History and Aesthetics from the University Paris VIII and an MA in Management and Conduct of Cultural Projects from the University Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle. She conceived and organized seminars and public programs presented by a number of institutions, including: SESC-SP, Goethe Institut, Videobrasil, World Biennial Forum. In 2015, she edited the book Southern Panoramas: Perspectives for other geographies of thought (Ed. SESC Videobrasil) which presents historical and artistic perspectives on the concept of the Global South. More recently, she served as a visiting researcher at Columbia University, with a grant from the Getty Foundation (Connecting Art Histories Program at Unicamp).