The trajectory of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark occupies a singular place in the movement of institutional critique that developed in the 1960s and 1970s. At the time, artists from many different countries focused their research on the institutional power that the so-called “art system” brought to bear on their works: from the spaces accorded them to the categories whereby the (official) history of art described them, by way of the media employed, the genres recognized, among other elements. Revealing, problematizing and overcoming such limitations became a major orientation of artistic practice, indeed, the precondition of its poetic force – of the artwork’s very vitality, from which emanates its power to critically intervene in reality.
Suely Rolnik is a psychoanalyst, cultural critic and exhibition curator, based in São Paulo Brazil, Rolnick temporarily sought exile in Paris, after the turbulent post -1968 era. An era marking the start of her friendship with Lygia Clark, whose work was the subject of a research project encompassing 64 filmed interviews, which became the backbone of an exhibition on Clark, Rolnick co-curated at the Musée de Beaux-arts de Nantes (2005) and the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2006).