Rivane Neuenschwander & Cao Guimarães

Brazilian artists Rivane Neuenschwander (1967) and Cao Guimarães (1965) grew up in Belo Horizonte and both attended the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. To this day, they continue to work together while also pursuing their individual practices.

Rivane Neuenschwander’s multidisciplinary body of work includes films, installations, paintings and photographs. She often utilises fragile and easily overlooked materials (such as cooking herbs, dried fruit and flowers or dried insects) to create enchanting aesthetic experiences through a process she describes as ‘ethereal materialism’. More recently, she has been developing projects involving children and addressing the subject of dreams. She also creates works dealing with major societal and political issues in Brazil: the rise of the far right; how deforestation in the Amazon is impacting the region’s indigenous population; femicide and dictatorship. Collaborating with people of all ages is a vital element of her practice.  

Cao Guimarães works at the intersection of cinema and visual art. Informed by early Brazilian video art, he used experiments with Super 8 film and a camera inherited from his grandfather to establish a personal visual language that looks for the poetry hidden in unexpected places. Guimarães’ approach is intentionally slow and open-ended, driven by a belief that art should emerge organically rather than through conscious development. Transformation and the element of chance are essential forces in his work.

The artists share an eye for the beauty and expressive power of fleeting everyday phenomena, a shared sensibility that lends an organic feel to their collaboration on the film Quarta-Feira de Cinzas / Epilogue. While Neuenschwander’s practice often involves pursuing dialogue with people, animals and organic processes, Guimarães contributes a cinematic and observant gaze – and artistic exchange that continues to the present day.