Photography’s Topic and Object, From Memento Mori to Advert Vitam Aeternam

The digicam doesn’t instantly seize the primary character in “Um ato fotográfico” however quite the machine that produces the picture itself. It just isn’t the topic, however the object. “O futuro é tão nostálgico,” the opening part of this exhibition, is a collection of still-life images depicting numerous objects and crops in classical preparations, alongside vintage analogue cameras. Here, the previous digicam is a fossil from a bygone period. Before coming into the gallery, the work “Ensaio sobre a runa” (2026) shows on the spot print images (Instax), considered one of them being a picture of a company doormat promoting the enterprise “Foto Yura.” A show case incorporates objects, photographs, and once more, cameras, alluding to the artist Alice Yura’s previous. Together, these parts evoke the stays of each a private and collective previous. Everything revolves round that small moveable machine—the digicam—an instrument able to eternally freezing a withered flower, of changing the doubtful and fleeting photographs of reminiscence with precise and concrete shapes.

The worth (each temporal and bodily) of the photographic picture, in addition to its epistemology, has modified with postmodernity and the event of photographic applied sciences. The analogic world now lies buried beneath the limitless circulation of digital photographs. In this exhibition, the artist turns towards a earlier period, through which the household picture album preserved an id for many years (the artist has made a number of copies out there to the viewer, who turns into a visitor inside a personal residence’s home archive), and she or he does so by exploring her family historical past. Alice Yura’s father, a Japanese immigrant, alongside together with her uncles and grandfather, labored as photographers of their hometown of Aparecida do Taboado, in Mato Grosso do Sul, the place her Brazilian mom owned a video rental store. This lineage is the main focus of the exhibition’s second part. We then transfer from the article, the digicam, to the topic, the photographed and the photographers. We see {a photograph} of the artist’s father and uncle backstage on the images studio, with their images umbrellas, lights and impartial backdrop, the place purchasers are photographed. In the foreground, the artist’s father appears to be like on the gentle. In the collection “Em meu pai, um estrangeiro” (2023), portraits despatched by her father whereas he was working in Japan between 1990 and 2010 are overlaid with messages alluding to intimate anecdotes. The exhibition is tender and nostalgic, but marked by a delicate darkish humor, with the inclusion of a lenticular print of a birthday picture the place joyful faces are hidden behind cranium masks. The passage of time, the memento mori (in distinction to the advert vitam aeternam), just isn’t directed towards the world of analog images, however quite towards the household itself, as portrayed.

From the article, the digicam, and the topic, the household portrayed, we transfer to the penultimate part of “us”: the viewer. In this exhibition, curated by Thierry Freitas, a images set is organized in order that anybody who needs can have their {photograph} taken posing in entrance of a white curtain, leaning towards a desk with a vase of plastic flowers. It is a frozen journey into the previous. Behind the curtain lies the ultimate cease on the journey.

Here, we return to the topic, Alice Yura, who portrays herself as Cupid or reenacting Diego Velázquez’s “La Venus del espejo” (between 1647-51), including one other layer of interpretation. It is not possible to not discover that Alice has undergone a gender transition, having seen the pictures through which she seems as a male baby, on trip, or at household occasions. In this collection, the transformation additionally pertains to a different style, belonging to the historical past of artwork, whose gaze remained static for hundreds of years: it was at all times males taking a look at ladies, or males imprisoned by want. A closing interpretive flip shifts the exhibition away from its preliminary considerations with images and reminiscence, maybe complicating them within the course of.

“Alice Yura: A Photographic Act”
Pina Contemporânea constructing (Praça Gallery)
Avenida Tiradentes, 273, Luz, São Paulo — SP
April 11 to September 13, 2026