The exhibition complexo brasil [complex Brazil], like its striking symbol, is a seductive and coarse flower that pulls us into its unfathomable depths. It is an invitation to experience intersections, subject to friction and risk, admiration and awe, horror and fascination.

We started from the principle that what is called Brazil (which is made up of many Brazils) is the complex result of colonial actions of great proportions and consequences in which Portugal dragged parts of Africa to America and took this immense indigenous land for itself. What has been termed ‘discovery’ was an act of force that conceals this traumatic origin. The exhibition aims to reveal the concealment of these Brazils and to offer the Portuguese and Brazilians, from a position of shared responsibility, the prospect of a reciprocal revealing. In it the appropriating act of violence and the whirlwind of human experiences are merged in a process of intersection and eruption that impacts us today.

We embrace the country as a powerful racial and cultural mosaic: a complex mix of biomes, ethnicities, cultures, times, logic, languages, religions and economic processes. We affirm one of Brazil’s strengths: the power of inclusion, that is, of a relationship with the world in which nothing is excluded, of which the Manto Tupinambá, Arthur Bispo do Rosário’s Manto da Apresentação and Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolés are examples. These, in some way, contain the story of Brazil. We stress the aesthetic and political revival of indigenous and black creators and thinkers. At the same time, and for this very reason, we bring to light the structural realities that have made the country unequal and violent.

Within the web of the many creative languages involved in Brazilian life, recognised for their capacity to problematise and enchant the world, the exhibition hopes to confront the challenge of complexo brasil – this drug that seems to act enigmatically as a poison while seeming to be a medicine, and as a medicine while seeming to be a poison.