Museified identities: how the curatorial narratives of national museums through art exhibitions became discursive platforms for the creation of modern identities in Brazil and Greece.
The power asymmetries historically continue to make an impact on narrative disputes over the process of modern invention of identities, and museums use art exhibitions as discursive platforms to publicize their own identity discourse. However, there are gaps in this process, mainly in actively listening to society's perception of these statements. Thus, the general objective of this doctoral research is to outline a theory that mediates between the museification of modern identities invented by national museums and their reception by the public based on experiences during visits to museums as well as personal and collective experiences related to the themes brought by the curators. For this, an ethnography will be carried out using the methodology of the anthropologist as curator (Sansi, 2019) with two art exhibitions as the research field, one in Brasília in Brazil and the other in Athens in Greece.
The first called “Future Brazil: the forms of democracy” held in 2023 at the National Museum of Brasília, curated by a team formed by the historian and anthropologist Lilia Schwarcz, the architect Rogério Carvalho, the actor Paulo Vieira and the Secretary of Culture of the Party of Workers (PT), Márcio Tavares. Bringing together around 180 works by different artists and multiple languages such as paintings, sculptures, drawings, video art, among others, the exhibition was organized into three large groups. “Remake Symbols”, which celebrates democracy and seeks to rescue national symbols. “Decoloniality'', which revisits themes of feminism, blackness, indigenous peoples, the LGBTQIA+ movement. And finally, the third: “it's us”, which invites the public to reflect on the ethnic, gender, regional and linguistic richness present in Brazilian culture.
And the second exhibition called “Urbanography – City Life in the 1950s-1970s” was held in 2024 at the National Gallery of Athens curated by art historian and museum director Syrago Tsiara. The exhibition presents a set of representations of the city in a variety of Greek art media with 211 works of art, covering painting, sculpture, engraving, installation, photography and film from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, seeking to demonstrate the rich diversity of urban experience. The exhibition was divided into seven axes: Urban scenery, Nostalgia, Construction site, Close-up, Spectacle, Dramas and conflicts and Materialities.
