Artist:
Tamar Guimarães (born 1967 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil; lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark).

Materials:
Digital color video, with sound, transferred from 16mm film; 13 min 30 sec.

Description:
“Canoas focuses on the preparations for a cocktail party at Casa das Canoas – the house Oscar Niemeyer built for himself in the early 1950s. The film stages a situation that echoes the house’s past use and glamor, set in the contemporary Brazilian cultural scene.”
—Pablo León de la Barra, “Tamar Guimarães, Canoas,” VDROME website, 2010.

“In this video, Guimarães stages a cocktail party in Casa das Canoas,the iconic home that architect Oscar Niemeyer designed for himself in Rio de Janeiro between 1951 and 1953. The apparent frivolity of the party is tempered by several more serious vignettes in which guests discuss Brazil’s past in terms of the relationship between modernity and social housing, political dictatorship and artistic exile. Yet these concerns strike a contradictory note in the party’s bourgeois context, a disparity that is underscored by the discreet presence of servants and waiters—despite the artistic and political idealism represented by Niemeyer’s modernist design, the reality of social stratification remains a part of Brazilian culture.”
—”Tamar Guimaraães, Canoas,” Guggenheim website.