Through performance art, photography and film, trans-Indigenous/Brazilian artist UÝRA tries to make sense, and advocate, in a hostile world. UÝRA — who identifies with she/her/they/them pronouns — has created a tight exhibition that focuses on prejudice and oppression, biodiversity and dispossession, ritual, the lasting wounds of colonialism and the goings-on of their young compatriots in the industrial center of Manaus, which sits central in the sprawling state of Amazonas. The threats directed at UÝRA and her ilk are real, the socio-economic status quo seemingly insurmountable.
It’s fitting that “The Living Forest: UÝRA,” on view at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire through September 24, is the artist’s first exhibition in the United States. The current similarities between the two countries are unsettling, from our rickety tri-branch federal systems to our seemingly unstoppable profit-driven environmental destruction to our high-risk, financialized economies. Above it all is fermenting religiosity: despite its majority Catholic population, Brazil’s most rapidly expanding religious group is Evangelical Protestantism, which has, as here, been co-opted by the country’s right wing political machine, an ouroboros that has only strengthened conversions. Racism, homophobia and transphobia are rife, as is a fiddle-while-Rome-burns disdain for the poor by an ever more precarious and commodity-obsessed middle class. On January 8, 2023, in a bizarre cosmic kiss, supporters of the defeated reactionary-right president Jair Bolsonaro — declaring the conclusive second round general election rigged — caused riots in Brazil’s federal buildings, calling though not for his restoration, but a return to military dictatorship.
UÝRA’s bold work attempts to capture the society around her, assembling brilliant costumes that synthesize it all: the natural world, the after-effects of industrialization, the horrifying push — most ruthlessly pursued by the Bolsonaro regime — to see the extermination of Brazil’s Indigenous peoples and integral ecosystem, all interconnected, expressed through a melding of contemporary performance art and ancestral ritual.
(To read more, pick up a copy of our latest issue! Find a pick-up location near you or Subscribe Here.)