Examining the known and unknown, Brazilian artist Abiniel João Nascimento’s work is the interplay of simple yet complex concepts. Archive, memory, and absence form the concepts of Nascimento’s art practice through their exploration of organic materials such as taboa fiber, soil, aluminum, cotton fabric, and rope. In essence, these materials symbolize and replicate the human experience and spirit. As viewers interact with their installations and performances, they too can grapple with the presented concepts akin to how the artist approaches their practice.

Who the artist is, is embedded in their work challenging the notions of art and here they invite us into their creative and methodical practice to explore more.

Photo credit: Domar (@domarrrrrrr)

About the Artist

Abiniel João Nascimento (Carpina - PE - BR, 1996) lives and works in Recife - Brazil. They are interested in the transmutations of presence as the basis of their investigations – whether poetic or philosophical. The reverse of the archive, memory and absence are key concepts for the structure of thought engendered by their work.

Nascimento has a BA in Museology and is currently persuing a Masters Degree in Visual Arts. Select exhibitions, residencies, and festivals include the solo exhibition "ACEIRO" at the Massangana and Baobá galleries (Recife - PE) as a result of the Joaquim Nabuco Foundation's artistic residency award in 2022; the "Radical Sounds Latin America" festival in Berlin (2023); and artistic residencies at Pivô - Arte e Pesquisa (São Paulo - SP, 2023), Terra Saúva (Botucatu - SP, 2024) and Galerie Paradise (Nantes - FR, 2022).

The Still of Impermanence — 2022, video still I

The Still of Impermanence — 2022, video still II

Artist Statement

I build my practice around the constructions of language, memory and the imaginary; territoriality, corporeality and spirituality. In the order in which these concepts are structured, starting from my own body as the product-matter of this construction, I organize them from the intersection of these relationships as a methodology.

In view of the investigations into the arrangement of these concepts, I organize them into 2 sets: 1. Archival Relations: as the sum of the relations of language, memory and imaginary; and 2. Relations of the land: as the junction of the relations of territoriality, corporeality and spirituality, thus drawing themselves as six crossed arrows making up what I call Relations in Coloniality (Archil Relations + Relations of the land = RC), which becomes the conceptual motto of my research. These six converging and disparate forces act as guides for an investigation into the presence of a collective body that crosses compulsory dynamics of life/death, existence/extinction, reality/fiction, memory/forgetting.

If initially I sought to subscribe to an artistic practice that conjures up a method that plays with historical symbolic and figurative materiality (as seen in the works from the “Archive exercises” serie), at the moment my yearnings are for a radical dive into what presents itself as a possibility of imagination - turning my gaze to dreamlike images, to what is called abstraction, to the study of form, to immateriality and to what is embodied from material relationships, observing the agency of matter in poetic production (as present in the works “The Sentinel”, "The Witness" and "Cross Tongues").

Closer to the relationship with materials, I have been investigating the possibility of conversations between the human, non-human and/or more-than-human relationship, based on the encounter with organic and inorganic materialities: vegetable fiber, clay, fruits, roots and vegetables with their creative faculties, leather, wax, stone, wood, iron, among other materials, are in my field of investigative interest. Highlighting the confluences in the conjunction of these, as family and territorial practices, I point to an effort to present the knowledge of an imagined ancestry.