Hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Júlia Rebouças is the Artistic Director of Instituto Inhotim in Brumadinho, Brazil, and is a Brazilian curator, researcher, and art critic. In her role, she oversees the artistic direction of one of Latin America’s largest open-air museums, developing exhibitions, commissions, and programs that bring contemporary art into dialogue with Inhotim’s botanical landscape, architecture, and surrounding territory. Her current work includes shaping the institution’s twentieth-anniversary program and considering how museums can operate as spaces of sustained encounter, experimentation, and public engagement. Previously, Rebouças worked as a curator at Inhotim and held curatorial roles at institutions and large-scale exhibitions including the São Paulo Bienal, the Mercosul Biennial, and Sesc_Videobrasil. Her practice has consistently addressed the relationships among contemporary artistic production, institutional structures, landscape, and social and political life.
Plant Art, Cultivate Museum
In this talk, she will explore the idea that art can generate nature. Inspired by archaeological research showing that the Amazon rainforest is the result of the work of complex, populous societies that inhabited South America for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans on the continent, Reboucas aims to challenge the idea that nature and culture are always opposing forces. Drawing on this premise, the talk traces an arc through three curatorial and institutional experiences. It begins with the 32nd São Paulo Biennial (2016) and its concept of “Live Uncertainty,” which positioned art as a creative force capable of proposing new ways of living amid climate crisis and civilizational collapse. It then turns to the 36th Panorama of Brazilian Art – Sertão (2019), where the idea of "backcountry / sertão" was developed as an epistemology: art as resistance and reinvention rooted in a specific territory, climate condition, biome, and its political and cultural crossings. Finally, the talk arrives at ongoing work at Instituto Inhotim, where curatorial research expands beyond the symbolic realm into a management program, proposing concrete practices, labor relations, and governance models that actively generate more culture and more nature. Museums, as a rule, have acted as hunter-gatherers. This talk proposes that they must also learn to plant and cultivate.