Portraits by Kika Nicolela (in person)

Part of Summer 2017

A maestro of startling documentary reinvention, Brazilian artist Kika Nicolela, part-time community saviour and veteran of internationalist fringe movie showcases, returns to Toronto to present three of her most prescient encounters. At each turn she finds a way to shine a light onto forgotten faces, the lives of trans women, and the indomitable Marquise of Santos, a larger-than-life figure who courted controversy and royal privilege. This mini-retrospective includes a bevy of award-winners including Flickering (2009), Trópico de Capricórnio (Tropic of Capricorn), 2005, and Biografias (Biographies), 2016.

Program:
Flickering
2009, single-channel video, 2:44 min.
From darkness to light, and back to darkness; an emotional self-portrait.

Trópico de Capricórnio (Tropic of Capricorn)
2005, single-channel video, 30 min.
Four transsexuals are brought in to a hotel room on the same night. Each trans woman is asked to lay on a bed in an empty room and reveal herself to a camera mounted on the ceiling. As the film progresses, their stories blend, separate and overlap in a beautifully-constructed collage of multi-coloured images. They share with the camera their fantasies, hopes, questionings and experiences in the streets of Sao Paulo.

Biographies (Biographies)
2016, 4K digital film, 30 min.
Biographies produces a complex narrative that departs from a historical research about a strong female historical character, and mixes it with personal stories from the 5 actresses portraying her.

Domitila de Castro do Canto e Melo, the Marquise of Santos, is one of the most famous and controversial historical figures from Brazil. She lived in the 19th century and was the long-term mistress of the Emperor Dom Pedro I. Her biography is fascinating and rich, full of dubious events and facts, contradictions, paradoxes. Above all, she is a woman who overcame all the gender limitations of her time. Still very much alive in the imaginary of Brazilian people, there are many myths and legends around her, to the point of transforming her in a kind of a deity.

Domitila is therefore a great subject for a work that intends to bring to the foreground the interpretative process and subjective choices that take place in historical discourses. The narrative intertwines performances that actualize history into personal and contemporary fictions. This film originated from the 2014 site-specific installation Domitilas.

Tropic of Kika: an interview with Kika Nicolela by Mike Hoolboom (May 2017)

Kika Nicolela
b. 1976, Brazil
lives and works in Brussels and São Paulo
www.kikanicolela.com

Kika Nicolela is interested in the encounter with the other, mediated by the camera – mostly, the video camera. Her works often involve participative methods, engaging communities in the creative process, as well as collaboration with other artists and performers. She assimilates both fictional and documentary aspects in her moving image works, fabricating a space of fluctuation and indeterminacy in which borders and opposed binaries become incongruous. This ambivalence in the moving image is what she is searching for: works that produce a real experience of the very ambiguity of our own subjectivity and of the real.

Graduated in Film and Video by the University of Sao Paulo, Kika Nicolela has also completed a Master of Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHDK). The artist was nominated for the international award EXTRACT – Young Art Prize in 2014, and she was the recipient of several prominent Brazilian grants and awards, such as the FUNARTE Award to Contemporary Art (2011, Ministry of Culture) and the Exhibition Abroad Award (2010, granted by the Bienal Foundation and Ministry of Culture). She has participated of over 100 solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including the Kunst Film Biennale (Germany), Bienal of the Moving Image (Argentina), Bienal do Mercosul (Brazil), Ventosul Bienal de Curitiba (Brazil) and Bienal de Video y Artes Mediales (Chile). Some of the main spaces that presented her works are: MASP – São Paulo Museum of Art, MIS – Museum of Image and Sound, Museum of the City of São Paulo, Paço das Artes, Centro Cultural São Paulo, Vermelho Gallery, Sesc Pompéia, Sesc Pinheiros and Sesc Vila Mariana, in São Paulo; Museum of Modern Art, Salvador; Gustavo Capanema Palace, Rio de Janeiro; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; TPW Gallery, Toronto; GL Strand, Copenhagen; Galeria des Angels, Barcelona; LOOP Gallery, Seoul; and Parc de La Vilette, Paris. Her videos have been screened and awarded in festivals of more than 30 countries, such as: Milan International Film Festival, Uppsala International Short Film Festival, Bilbao International Film Festival, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Japan Media Arts Festival, Videoformes New Media & Video Art Festival and International Electronic Art Festival Videobrasil. As a curator, Kika Nicolela has developed programs for the National Gallery of Iceland, for the festivals Screen Festival (Spain), Videoformes (France), Alucine Toronto Latino Media Festival (Canada), AIVA Angelholm International Video Art Festival (Sweden), CineDesign (Brazil), Experimenta! (Brazil), Festival Miden (Greece) and for the projects Wikitopia (China), Directors Lounge (Germany) and Manipulated Image (US). In 2012, Nicolela curated the IMAGEM-CONTATO: Moving Image Festival, presenting 225 works by artists such as Bill Viola, Nam June Paik, Jan Svankmajer, Stan Brackage and Pipilotti Rist in various venues in Sao Paulo. Since 2008, Kika Nicolela also curates and coordinates the Exquisite Corpse Video Project, an ongoing collaborative series of videos that involves more than 80 artists from 25 countries. She has received artist-in-residences stipends at the Sumu AIR (Finland), Rondo Studio (Austria), Künstlerdorf Schöppingen Foundation (Germany), Gyeonggi Creation Center (South Korea), Casa das Caldeiras (Brazil), Objectifs (Singapore), Route Fabrik (Switzerland), LIFT Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (Canada) and Residence en Lycee Agricole en Region Auvergne (France), among others. Kika Nicolela is represented by Vtape (Canada) and Duplo Galeria (Brazil).