São Paulo biennale overview – chanting timber and harmonal buzzing create a cacophony of artwork | Artwork and design

Meditation and non secular connection could also be OK in small doses, however after three flooring and 30,000 sq metres of darkened rooms, theatrical installations, altars and votive sculpture, extra sound work than I’ve ever encountered in a single present, and a normal encouragement to be moved, mesmerised and in contact with my non secular facet, my ears are ringing and I really feel fairly on edge.

The São Paulo biennale, the second oldest artwork exhibition of its kind on the planet, takes the title Not All Travellers Walk Roads for its thirty sixth version, a line, which, with some irony, is from Of Calm and Silence, a poem by the Brazilian author Conceição Evaristo. In Cameroonian curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung’s present of 120 artists, this interprets as imagining different types of consciousness, invariably seeking to nature and non-western perception techniques.

The sound of birdsong greets you as you stroll into the exhibition pavilion from São Paulo’s Ibirapuera Park. There are birds outdoors, however that is the recorded soundtrack to a backyard planted within the gallery by US-Nigerian artist Precious Okoyomon. It options contemporary earth, boulders and a tranquil pool, a mass of moss and timber that bow within the Brazilian warmth coming by the pavilion glass. Later within the present, a botanist interviewed for a video set up by Theo Eshetu – all excessive closeups of vegetation, flowers mirrored and botanical footage shot in kaleidoscope – explains about plant “consciousness”, and the way consciousness could not all the time be linked to the mind and might be skilled by different means. In this synthetic backyard we’re inspired to convene with nature.

The tweeting and chirrupping has competitors although: a sound system has been arrange by Gê Viana, the audio system interspersed with the artist’s collages of forest fauna and previous reggae maranhense events. The subgenre of reggae that flourished within the Brazilian state of Maranhão, melodic and maybe a bit sexier, booms throughout the gallery area. If that is the form of different consciousness being inspired, perhaps I’m down with it. Whether the festivities are appreciated by Nádia Taquary’s bronze bird-women is unclear nonetheless. They don’t appear occasion sorts: their eagle heads bowed, they pray and undertake yogic-style poses round an amazing yellow tree, beaded branches hanging low from a bronze trunk. It is titled Ìrókò: The Cosmic Tree, and represents the orisha lord of ancestry in Candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian faith. More objects of worship are obvious too in a collection of “altars” and “guardians” by French artist Carla Gueye, black clay obelisks with protruding breasts sat on beds of charcoal. Such votives grow to be a recurring theme all through the present, symbols of perception on this busiest of environments.

Specific supplies reappear all through the exhibition, too. Gueye’s briquettes are recalled in Emeka Ogboh’s The Way Earthly Things Are Going, a darkened room by which a collection of spotlit tree trunks are embedded in circles of charcoal. Looped chanting emerges by audio system embedded within the wooden. There’s charcoal, too, in Antonio Tarsis’s Orchestra Catastrophe: Act 1. Lumps of the stuff suspended on pendulums rhythmically hit a collection of drums. Tree trunks pop up a number of occasions too, akin to in Indigenous American composer Raven Chacon’s collaboration with producer Laima Leyton and former Sepultura drummer Igor Cavalera. The wooden is once more spotlit in spectacular style and soundtracked, this time with a composition impressed by Brazilian Indigenous music.

Fabric and textiles, knotted, pleated and tied, are in every single place: Theresah Ankomah has wrapped the biennale pavilion in a number of nets Christo-style. Indo-Caribbean artist Suchitra Mattei invitations us into a sublime tent constituted of twisted sari materials and Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos has created a collection of floor-to-ceiling pillars from discovered cloth that run all through the present. On every stage is one among Otobong Nkanga’s beguiling tapestries of the pure world (or the pure world despoiled) whereas Laure Prouvost’s large kinetic pink textile orchid suggestively floats up and down the peak of the constructing’s atrium.

The audio works take the type of spoken poems; there are chants and ambient electronica inside installations, excessive frequency noise and hormonal buzzing, darkened rooms by which mechanical devices play; there are smoke and mirrors, literal and symbolic. As he does at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, the place he’s been director since 2023, Soh Bejeng Ndikung retains signage to a minimal (so it’s typically difficult to determine which work is by whom), and so the present shapes up as one large sensory set up.

On the second ground, hints of urbanity creep in with a collection of pictures of rivers by Wolfgang Tillmans. One exhibits a barge on the Amazon laden with cargo, in one other we see the night-time illumination of a metropolis on the shore of the Rhine. There’s one other tent-like construction, although in contrast to Mattei’s silks, Zimbabwean artist Moffat Takadiwa’s walk-in sculpture is product of previous bottle tops and strung collectively discarded pc keyboard keys.

This welcome bout of realism is sustained in a multi-work presentation by one among Brazil’s most attention-grabbing artists. Gervane de Paula hails from Mato Grosso, which is known as a “hinterland” state, and he aggressively performs with the cliches connected to rural tradition, making hybrid wood animals that mess with the vernacular artwork traditions of the area. Turning the lovable memento on its head, two birds sport pistols for beaks. More disturbing nonetheless, the bottom on which they perch is marked “Comando Papo Vermelho”, a play on the title of one among Brazil’s greatest drug gangs. Like different artists within the biennale, de Paula has constructed an altar, however his is a cross with a Perspex entrance revealing it to be filled with prescribed drugs: the artist’s sculpture is playful even because it riffs on the customarily grim actuality of life past Brazil’s main centres.

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This sense of transgression – absent from among the extra obliquely sensorial works – is joyfully current in a lot of the historic work. Maria Auxiliadora da Silva paints wild scenes of events in her Seventies works; the Moroccan painter Chaïbia Talal renders jolly {couples} in nice impressionistic vibrant strokes; whereas the incredible Mozambican-Italian artist Bertina Lopez depicts glamorous ladies with pink lipstick and matching nails in an artwork nouveau model. Even higher are the forays into portray by the Rio de Janeiro samba legend Heitor dos Prazeres (a return for the artist, he was within the 1951 version of the biennale): all cool-cat Black Brazilians pulling shapes and having fun on the streets, evocative and stuffed with allure.

When I used to be mendacity on a tough metallic mattress, staring up at a light-weight present projected on to the ceiling of Camille Turner’s domed set up, DreamSpace, a voice imploring me to “Send love to guide the path to truth”, I’d been near that panic assault. I’m saved by a collection of extraordinary five-metre copper scrolls by octogenarian artist Gōzō Yoshimasu; the Japanese strains inscribed on their floor are largely obscured by the fabric’s slight reflection although, so actually it’s simply mild and shade I’m watching. It is very lovely. These calm and silent banner-poems are accompanied by Yoshimasu’s blotchy summary watercolours on graft paper. They are titled Dear Monster and it makes me wonder if I’m the monster for not being moved by a lot of the clearly dearly felt artwork that preceded Yoshimasu. Yet after these hi-tech, AV-heavy simulacra of non secular experiences, of nature and meditation, the Japanese artist appears proof that maybe the most effective artwork doesn’t depend on advanced bells and whistles.