Spring Talks #3: Thiago de Paula Souza

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Thiago de Paula Souza

As part of ongoing organizational collaboration and exchange with Berlin-based art centres, Or Gallery has invited curator Thiago de Paula Souza to present on recent projects and initiatives, including is participation in the 10th Berlin Biennale.

For Or Gallery, the convener of this gathering, the intention is that these discussions will share curatorial, discursive, and networking strategies as part of an ongoing project to develop anti-colonial and socially and politically progressive exhibition practices. This visit will also provide an opportunity for curators to directly engage with and compare contemporary art contexts with their Canadian peers, while taking into account the development of Vancouver as comprised of diverse cultural diasporas in the historical context of the colonial dispossession of Indigenous peoples, on whose unceded territory the city occupies and operates.

Thiago de Paula Souza is a curator and educator, a member of the 10th Berlin Biennale curatorial team, titled We Don’t Need Another Hero, 2018 and 2018/2019 Fellow at BAK (basis voor actuele kunst). At the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo (2016) de Paula Souza joined the Accra Study Days team and was also part of the Bienal’s Oficina de Imaginação Política (political imagination workshop). De Paula Souza worked as an educator at Museu AfroBrasil, São Paulo (2014–2016), and co-curated the exhibition Living On – In Other Words on Living?, held at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2016).

De Paula Souza is interested in how certain communities engage in the deconstruction of hegemonic readings of histories. He has collaborated with lanchonete.org, an artist-led cultural platform focused on daily life and progressive actions in contemporary cities with São Paulo as a reference point, and co-created We Cannot Build What We Cannot First Imagine, a visionary platform that gathers works and perspectives from racialized artists and thinkers. He has an MA in Art History from The University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Campinas, Brazil.

Read an interview with Thiago de Paula Souza on his work at the 10th Berlin Biennale here.