Cinthia Marcelle at MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona

July 15, 2022–January 8, 2023

Cinthia Marcelle’s (b. 1974, Belo Horizonte) first show to provide a comprehensive overview of her work is titled A Conjunction of Factors . The interwoven layers of Marcelle’s practice reveal a persistent concern with rethinking the dynamics of collectivity. Marcelle’s practice is motivated by a desire to disorganize the hierarchies and binary oppositions that characterize our daily interactions.

A Conjunction of Factors inspires associations and linkages between Marcelle’s continuous concerns and ways of working by reflecting the evolution of her practice through recurring series and across various media. Similar motions are carried out in her work on very different scales. Materials change shape as they move through installations, still images, and moving pictures. Various arrangements of motifs are used repeatedly. Series of works can be presented together or kept in reserve like a deck of cards to be used in an association game; they don’t start and stop, but rather recede and emerge.

A Conjunction of Factors highlights Marcelle’s distinctive aesthetics, from the development of atmospheric mise-en-scènes to the development of a poetics of accumulation, multiplication, and repetition. It includes works from 1999 to the present and combines evocative moving image works, photographs, large-scale installations, and subtle spatial interventions. The exhibition also highlights Marcelle’s long-standing habit of including a variety of people in her artistic creation, including musicians, laborers, and people she sees on a daily basis. They appear to be both completely imaginary and true to life in the activities they take for images and movies, which fall somewhere between the manufactured and the spontaneous. The inclusion and representation of others in her work alludes to the labor, class, and racial inequalities that permeate our daily encounters as well as the predominate social and political order when combined with materials and colors that conjure up particular contexts.

In order to describe how big events happen—not than as the result of a single cause but rather as the result of an unanticipated interplay between various actors and forces—the phrase “a confluence of factors” is frequently employed. The exhibition includes work created by Marcelle as a solo artist, as a duo with Tiago Mata Machado and Jean Meeran, and in collaboration with the web platform aarea.co, emphasizing her conjunctive approach to both practice and authorship.

Related activities and publication

A number of events will be held in conjunction with the exhibition, such as a discussion between Cinthia Marcelle and the exhibition’s curator, Isobel Whitelegg, before its opening on July 14 at 7 p.m., the cycle of “Let’s talk…” discussions that will start in October and occur every Thursday at 6 p.m., and the commented visits (in Catalan and Spanish).

The publication Cinthia Marcelle: A Conjunction of Factors includes a selection of works by the Brazilian artist from the late 1990s to the present, together with an essay by curator Isobel Whitelegg. Bilingual edition in Spanish and English.