Sheila Ribeiro – Neither National Nor Geographic

Mostra personale.

Comunicato stampa

PostmastersROMA is thrilled to announce the first solo exhibition of Sheila Ribeiro, a multifaceted artist who acts on the unconnected, or more so, the unconnectable.

Does Sheila Ribeiro defy the laws of physics? In one sitting she can take you from Beirut to Sao Paulo to Montreal to Rome to everywhere and nowhere, to inner and outer spaces. And this is where she wants to take you with Neither National Nor Geographic.

The show is an exact reflection of the impossibility to precisely define the artist. The site specific colorful graffiti installation is a background to the multitude of ideas and concepts such as shifting cultural movements, fashion, communication, history and how it is all related in complex systems of the contemporary imaginary.

Neither National Nor Geographic (2021), Sheila Ribeiro’s latest work, in a form of a film and a series of collages is an atemporal archive of a #here index. It’s a precise script and at the same time a multi dimensional puzzle. It’s a map with playful transcartographies. Drawing on the digital, Ribeiro meticulously handcrafts signs, tags and data creating a narrative of homemade algorithms. Everything exists as code. Things can’t be caught, they escape and evaporate; they are impossible to control. In NNNG geography and time doesn’t exist anymore. Only the tension between the imaginary and reality.

The film itself is a collage of images and footage from a personal archive of the artist’s life and other people’s files. It also includes the individual collages. The works on paper are precious, small in scale, and they are deliberately made with some elements printed on a low quality printer for its DIY effect. The collages mix imagery again from the artist’s archive, as well as newspapers, magazines and books and fragments from Ribeiro’s past artworks.

Don’t expect to understand everything, come with curiosity and bring your memories.

Among major international institutions and wise anonymous artists, the Brazilian/Canadian Sheila Ribeiro has worked worldwide, including Espacio de Arte Contemporaneo (Montevideo), Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo), Society for the Technological Arts (Montréal), Transmediale Berlin, Kunsten Festival des Arts (Brussels), Q Contemporary (Beirut), Super-Deluxe (Tokyo), Sesc (São Paulo) and with the most interesting cultural operators like writer Padma Viswanathan, filmmaker Sophie Deraspe (CA), choreographer Alejandro Ahmed (UR), artist Yotsuya Simon (JP), anthropologist Massimo Canevacci (IT), architect Decio Tozzi (BR), or young artists like Elaine Soares (BR). “I have always been in transit, cohabiting with contexts that are partially or completely foreign to each other”. Thus, she is a Professor of Art&Interdisciplinarity in Salvador (BR) and a consultant for the National Mental Health Programme (Lebanon).