Rivane Neuenschwander frequently engages her public in games, alllowing them to interact with the work and to form their own works using the éléments she provides. Thus one work consisted of typewriters from which all letters had been removed and only punctuation and symbols remained. The public were invited to use the typewriters to make their own images. Other works set out letters with which the visitor may make words in a grid. Neuenschwander also makes films that investigate language and space. Her work often seems ephemeral - for example her film The Tenant follows a soap bubble around a building and the viewer expects it constantly to explode. In other works she has employed herbs and spices to form architectural éléments that mimic the architecture of the space in which it is exhibted while making obvious reference to the work of Daniel Buren. Neuenschwander combines a strong conceptual outlook with a sense of the poetic and the ecological.
Rivane Neuenschwander was born in 1967 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where she lives and works.
Mapa Mundi - Rivan Neuenschwander - 2007
Postcards and wooden shelves
Mapa Mundi is an interactive work consisting of 65 postcards of photographs taken by the artist. The photographs depict businesses, hôtels and locations in her native Brasil which are named after foreign cities, places or countries. Arranged alphabetically on the shelves, the postcards provide a unique map of the world, to be explored and enjoyed without ever having to leave Brazil. Each image evokes the fantasy of travel of the person who named the place, or the Memory they were trying themselves to evoke of other parts of the world they had visited or came from. The visitor is encouraged to participate by taking home with them one or more postcards thus disseminating the work more widely. Thus the work itself travels while the people whose places they depicts arguably remain trapped by their socio-economic circumstances. The work represents Brazil in the world and the world in Brazil. The works seriality and its coneptual Framework relate it back to art of the 1970s, to works by Richard Long consisting of post cards sent while travelling, or On Kawara who sent cards indicating he was alive.
