Instituto Inhotim in Brumadinho, Brazil, recently inaugurated nine permanent large-scale works, Nine New Destinations, by the artists Chris Burden, Doug Aitken, Edgard de Souza, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Jorge Macchi, Matthew Barney, Rivane Neuenschwander, Valeska Soares, and Yayoi Kusama.
Inhotim is a museum complex, formed by a non-linear sequence of pavilions in the midst of a botanical garden. The new works are assembled at the top of a mountain, inside dense woods, amidst eucalyptus trees, and behind a large lake. The integration and harmony between art and the environment is an essential part of Inhotim’s concept.
Among the works is small hilltop building in which visitors listen to a live feed of sounds taken from a couple hundred meters within the earth via geological microphones. The work by Doug Aitken called Sonic Pavilion creates a site-specific situation in which architecture fuses with an invisible artwork that is ever changing.
Another work is by Argentinian artist Jorge Macchi. Macchi is known for his watercolors of commonplace objects re-imagined as surrealistic situations reflecting different psychological states. For Inhotim, Jorge Macchi rendered one of his watercolors for the first time in three-dimensional form: the work Piscina is a sculptural realization of Macchi’s drawing of a telephone book with alphabetized tabs, transformed into a site-specific work that is also a functioning swimming pool.
Nine New Destinations has been curated by Allan Schwartzman, Jochen Volz, and Rodrigo Moura. The opening event on October 2, 2009, featured a performance by Arto Lindsay.
This video is the first segment by our new correspondents in Brazil, Daniel Rubim and Igor Vidor. Enjoy!
Nine New Destinations at Instituto Cultural Inhotim, October 5, 2009.
> Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.