Video Still

Video Still

Schipper mag ik overvaren? (Captain can I cross over?), 2025
HD Video, Single-channel, color, sound, 09:30 

The post Schipper mag ik overvaren? appeared first on Patricia Werneck Ribas.

The Dutch occupation of Northeast Brazil in the seventeenth century is not widely known internationally. In Brazil, however, it is often romanticized as a period of progress and development, especially when contrasted with Portuguese colonization. Yet, like other colonial ventures, Dutch Brazil was ultimately a commercial enterprise driven by profit and sustained through exploitative and inhumane practices.

In Balbúrdia—a Portuguese word meaning noise, confusion, or mess—artist Patricia Werneck Ribas revisits this chapter of Brazilian history through collage. By deconstructing prints of well-known paintings by Albert Eckhout and Frans Post—artists sent to Brazil to document its landscape, flora, fauna, and people in service of the colonial project—and reassembling these fragments together with contemporary photographs of Brazil and pieces of painted paper, new hybrid images emerge. These compositions suggest creatures of Brazilian fauna and flora, challenging the colonial gaze and proposing alternative visual narratives.

The paintings of Eckhout and Post played a crucial role in legitimizing Johan Maurits’s authority as both a colonial and cultural leader. Their works contributed to early racial classification systems, embedding social hierarchies within European visual culture. In Brazil, reproductions of these images became some of the earliest visual representations of its people and environments, shaping national self-perception through the eyes of the colonizer.

The post Balbúrdia appeared first on Patricia Werneck Ribas.

Video still

“How to Catch a Flying Uterus” 2024
HD Video, color, sound, 3:49 min

“How to Catch a Flying Uterus” revisits the once prevalent idea of the flying uterus in Western society, which persisted until the early twentieth century and was believed to be the cause of several female pathologies.

The use of found footage from archival materials, film reels, and digital media over a frenzied soundtrack seeks to revive and challenge images belonging to misogynistic narratives in attempts to control and possess female bodies. The overall surreal use of color and sound helps delineate the absurdity in the violence inflicted on women throughout the centuries.

The post How to Catch a Flying Uterus appeared first on Patricia Werneck Ribas.

Para M (To M), 2023
Single channel, video, sound, 11:47 min.

Watch trailer: https://mediakunst.net/professional/#!/artwork/ma-1022470

A woman’s voice passionately addresses the enigmatic figure “M” in a narrative that initially portrays a positive shift as one colonial ruler replaces another. However, the story ultimately exposes the persistent and oppressive nature of the colonial enterprise within an enduring framework.

The initial “M” refers to Maurits in Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, a seventeenth-century governor sent to Brazil as a representative of the Dutch West Indies Company. Despite the prevailing positive perception of this governmental change and idealized views of Maurits’s presence in Brazil, recent research uncovers the dark legacy of his dictatorship. The letter “M” emerges as a symbol branded on the skin of enslaved Africans under his possession.

Through a creative juxtaposition of images featuring women and reappropriated colonial arte-facts in and around Recife,Brazil —an outpost of Dutch occupation—the essay film intricately weaves a poetic letter. It seeks to discern the potential for the subaltern voice to articulate itself. The film powerfully underscores that, while the articulation of truth may demand time, its revelation remains an inevitable prospect.

Read article on Para M by curator and writer Ive Stevenheydens on Mediakunst.net:

This project was mas possible with the generous support of The Mondriaan Fonds, Amarte Fonds and CBK Zuidoost.

The post Para M appeared first on Patricia Werneck Ribas.

video still

The Possessed, 2022
Single-channel video, sound, 16:15min

Watch teaser: https://mediakunst.net/professional/#!/artwork/ma-1022040

In The Possessed, Patricia Werneck Ribas alludes to the resilience of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomble in the face of colonial and modernist imposition. 

The artist juxtaposes fragments of influential texts from European thinkers over footage of practitioners of Candomble carrying out rituals on a deserted Brazilian beach. But they are not invoking demons that horror films and Christianity would have us believe. Candomble arose through a process of syncretism between traditional religions of West Africa, particularly that of the Yoruba, and the prevalent Roman Catholicism in Brazil when it was still a colony of Portugal. 

Brought to Brazil by the Portuguese during the sixteenth through to the nineteenth century, enslaved Africans were taken to plantations where few could speak the same language.  It was in the plantation owners’ own interest to discourage communication – all for the sake of avoiding rebellion. Despite this language barrier, they could still recognize common elements in each other’s belief systems. Thus they attempted to create a sense of community for themselves, separated from their families and displaced unwillingly from one continent to another.

Although Candomblé has always been marginalized by the Roman Catholic church, it has grown in popularity and remains a site of resistance against white Christian European domination.

Read article on The Possessed by curator and writer Ive Stevenheydens on Mediakunst.net

This project was made possible with the generous support of the Mondriaan Fund.

The post The Possessed appeared first on Patricia Werneck Ribas.

Photography: 40 photographs and Artist’s book.

In 2008, Patricia W. Ribas started photographing Brazilians living in Amsterdam who, due to different reasons, had been undocumented for a certain period of time. During these photo sessions, the conversations would always revolve around the feeling of homesickness and the wish to go back to the motherland.

After having photographed more than fifteen people, Ribas decided to take the negatives to Brazil with her and, as a symbolic gesture, perform an Afro-Brazilian-inspired ritual with them.

While in Brazil, she dipped the negatives in a cocktail of tropical fruits and drinks and let them soak in the mixture for three weeks. After that, she laid them out to dry on printed literary texts.

The results of the ritual are 40 images-15  portraits and 25 abstracts. The artist’s book (only 150 copies) contains 72 pages, it is printed on IBO 1 paper and it includes an essay in English, Dutch, and Portuguese by Sebastian Rapson.

Many thanks to the several generous individual donations to the crowdfunding campaign at Voordekunst, the support of the Mondriaan Fund, and Pictoright Steunfonds.

This project was made possible with the generous support from The Mondriaan Fund.

The post Dispatch to Origin appeared first on Patricia Werneck Ribas.

This work is also distributed by LIMA

Watch trailer here

©2020 Patricia Werneck Ribas

 (video still)

This project was made possible with the financial support of the Mondriaan Fund.

Press Release:

Since the 1800s German people have been fascinated with Native Americans. A rough estimate is that 40,000 to 80,000 people, all over the country, participate in ‘powwows’ where they dress up in traditional clothing, dance together and chant. Patricia Werneck Ribas traveled to a little village called Grimma close to Dresden to collect images of these gatherings and to research these phenomena. It may be a surprise to learn that dressing up as indigenous peoples is a thriving subculture in these cold lands. These scenes of German people in full native costume dancing in a circle inside a huge tent have a documentary character. The artist wanted to go beyond looking at the absurdity of white people dressing up as Native Americans, however. We see men and women wearing headdresses made of eagle feathers chanting and stamping their feet while wearing noisy bells on their ankles. In their leather beaded moccasins, fringed patchwork aprons, shiny sequined skirts, they slowly circle the large canvas tent. Patricia Werneck Ribas learned that these chants are carefully researched and the rituals are supposedly ‘authentic’. For some people, these gatherings are seen as cultural appropriation and are controversial. For this artwork, the artist has added something else. She edited a conversation between two tribal women from South America looking at the video images of the Germans slow dancing in their ‘exotic’ costumes. The sound of the Europeans chanting can be heard in the background while the women speak. This unexpected combination is neither critical nor condoning these fascinating get-togethers, just opening up a space to reflect on what it means to be ‘the other’.

The video begins with the camera slowly panning down to the ground, showing us where all plants emerge from. From the start, we are invited to look differently at this lush European landscape.  The Germans wear clothes inspired by the Sioux and Dakota tribes, and these events belong to a revered history following the extensive German colonization in the Americas. Buffalo Bill, an American soldier, and bison hunter toured Europe, performing in shows that displayed cowboy themes and episodes from the frontier and Indian Wars. These shows inspired German children, and then adults, to dress up in indigenous clothing and learn about the different native cultures. Even before the First World War circuses brought over people from the Americas and powwows became much more common in German towns and villages. Now tourism thrives in reservations in the USA, continuing the German fascination with the ‘exotic’ and romantic idea of the native warrior and a culture that has an ‘innocent’ communion with nature.  Stories about the Mid-West, travel diaries, and documentaries about the white people’s colonization of Western states fed into idealistic literature, in particular, narratives of resistance as native societies resisted American dominance.  In addition, when the German film industry was in crisis at the start of the 20^th Century, German ‘cowboy and Indian’ films helped revive the German film industry, which also fed into the Teutonic fascination with the ‘Wild West’ and people from the prairies. 

So, in this video, women from a non-specific tribe heard that some people from the North have affinities with the Indian spirit and organize these powwows in huge tents. Watching this video is as if the two women are also observers of these scenes. Seeing potential in a shared love of nature, they wanted to study the possibilities of contacting the Germans to see if they could be allies in the women’s quest to take over the world, finding solutions to global environmental problems.

This video combines footage of native Germans dancing in a tent with audio and subtitled observations from undisclosed observers. Here, they are viewers, too.  Looking at these images is their ‘first contact’ with Northern Europeans.  The women wondered – will people in the North be willing to abandon their comforts? What would they give up to help save the planet?  The women’s plan is not yet known but there around 40 million indigenous people in Latin America getting ready to organize themselves and investigating the possibilities of working together for a common cause.

In Patricia Werneck Ribas’s video, we don’t see the women, but we hear their voices. Speaking in a mysterious language they say, “Our proposal is unique in the history of humankind. We need to help them overcome greed and individualism.”  They are passionate about their mission to transform the world. Fading out at the end, we are still left with questions about the relationship between the indigenous women from South America and the German devotees of North American tribal cultures. Will this encounter be a real possibility of enabling change or are the women’s hopes just a fantasy? 

text © Siobhan Wall 2019

The post Tribal Affairs appeared first on Patricia Werneck Ribas.

The texts are made up of words written individually in the dark with a torch (light painting) and then assembled in Photoshop. |
Inkjet prints on Canson Baryta Paper, various dimensions.

hope_teal

hope_red

hope_pink

hope_blue

Machos

Cultivate

your_mind

inthemood

what_if

melting_away

Tropical_love

still_becoming

Some_things_will_be_all_right

living_in

lalala

Sheshall

How_useful

Embrace

Egos

cannot_help

Accept mortality

Even_latinos

another

endless

are_you

The post Notes appeared first on Patricia Werneck Ribas.

Press Release
Text by Siobhan Wall
(© Siobhan Wall 2019)

Head (of a woman)

Heads have become central to Patricia Werneck Ribas’s recent work about identity. In the annex of the gallery, she has hung subdued images of the back of her shaved head taken when she was having chemotherapy. These seemingly gender-neutral heads are almost anti-portraits with their minimalistic aesthetic. In contrast, she has hung vividly coloured wigs in the adjoining space. She uses these apparently contrasting forms to explore underlying concerns in women’s lives, drawing on her own experience and memories. This is more than just a collection of personal narratives, however, she will be ‘painting’ the space with artificial highly saturated hairpieces. These straight crimson, purple, blue, yellow locks are her palette; a way to invite the viewer to identify with the glamour of dressing up and to expand on an idea of what it means to be female.

Along with other projects she has worked on, her mixed media work such as Head (of a Woman) is informed, but not confined by feminist thinking. The vividly pigmented strands of hair are only one element in her current work. She uses found objects and her own photographs of the back of her head to create minimalistic pieces that elude easy categorization. Based on her experience of recovery from a serious illness, she uses these images to relate her memories to a deeper understanding of illness and recovery. Using two contrasting pieces of work, she believes that it is in looking at the interstices between one image and another than new meanings emerge. What is missing in the spatial arrangement of the photographs invites a concerned gaze, for example.

Questions of ‘identity’ run throughout her work, a word which is always predicated on defining what we are not as a way of thinking through who we are. She sees the artist as someone who is always making decisions that have strong cultural and social ramifications- whether this is explicit in the artwork or not. Her focus is on inviting the viewer to imagine themselves in the place of the other- as in the way she depicts the back of her head in the centre frame rather than showing us her face.

In some ways, this is a documenting of her relationship to her illness and how she wanted to depict a more universal understanding of the human head.

Installation details at Josilda da Conceição Gallery:

The post Head (of a Woman) appeared first on Patricia Werneck Ribas.

For the new works I used old photographic self-portraits taken over the course of several years. These old photographs were first torn apart, recycled, moulded into new shapes and then painted.

With this work I want to investigate the need for images, specially those of the self in a moment in time when we get bombarded with billions of images on a daily basis.

Installation: “I am many islands”, 2018
47 pieces
materials: recycled inkjet fine art photographic prints, acrylic paint, metal pins.
format: variable

(detail)
“Primary Me”, 2018
Format:25×25 cm each
Materials: recycled fine art photographic prints, acrylic paint, insect exhibit cases

The post Caterpillar appeared first on Patricia Werneck Ribas.