Madelene Andersson Travel Guide

Cildo Meireles

Among the foremost Brazilian artists of his generation, Cildo Meireles has been a leading light of the ‘neo-concretist’ movement that emerged among Latin American artists in the 1970s, when the continent was pretty much wall-to-wall dictatorships. The experience of making art in conditions of repression is communicated in the most visceral, yet formally nuanced terms throughout this retrospective. A claustrophobic chamber consisting of a dense maze counstructed by some 6,000 rulers hangs from the ceiling to the floor, as 1,000 clocks tick menacingly all around and the some half a million plastic numbers are scattered on the floor crunch underfoot. Look out for the room covered in talc (which requires the visitor to don booties) and a living room in which every single object of furniture is painted a different shade of red. Cildo Meireles addresses your senses directly with eloquent, yet wordless testimony on life under Brazil’s military dictatorship.