JANAINA WAGNER
MAIN EXHIBITIONS
[upcoming]
Quando o segundo sol chegar / um cometa nos teus olhos - Planetário do Ibirapuera (BR)
Quebrante - OCA - 14th Bienal de Arquitetura de São Paulo (BR)
Curupira e a máquina do destino - COP 30 - Museu do Amanhã (BR)
Trilogia Transamazônica - Le Fresnoy-studio national des arts contemporains (FR)
PhD Recherche-création REALITY IN MELTDOWN: WORLDLING WITH ERRANT GHOSTS: CURUPIRAS, IRACEMAS, WEREWOLVES, IRON ELEPHANTS, FRANKENSTEIN CATTLE, SILVER MOONS, TERRESTRIAL COMETS AND GHOST BALEIAS ( Le Fresnoy-Studio National des Arts Contemporains + CEAC, FR)
SOLO
2024
2023
2015
I am molten matter sliding from the core of Earth to tell you interior things - Galeria Sardenberg (São Paulo, BR)
A comet in your eyes – Sursock Museum (Beirut, LB)
Quando o segundo sol chegar (Cometa) – Centro Cultural do Cariri (Crato, BR)
Cinema Caverna – Lanterna Mágica – Projeto Vênus (São Paulo, BR)
Baleia Fantasma – Pivô (São Paulo, BR)
Decupagem/ Crônica de um final anunciado - Museu de Arte de Ribeirão Preto (Ribeirão Preto, BR)
2024
2023
2022
2021
2020
2019
2018
2016
2015
2014
Era uma vez: história do céu e da terra – Pinacoteca de São Paulo (São Paulo, BR)
Ensaios de Uma Coleção – Galeria Municipal do Porto (Porto, PT)
Summertime – SUPERCOLLIDER - Brand Library (Los Angeles, USA)
Imaginar futuros com gestos silenciosos – Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo (Montevideo, UY)
22ª Bienal SESC Videobrasil - SESC 24 de Maio (São Paulo, BR)
Ópera Citoplasmática – Museu Oscar Niemeyer (Curitiba, BR)
Aliens are temporary - Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien (Berlin, DE)
Thinking beyond: moving-images for a post-pandemic world – Manifattura Tabacchi (Florence, IT)
Cuando no hay sombra es mediodía - Nube Gallery (Santa Cruz, BO)
A natural history of ruins - Pivô (São Paulo, BR)
Casa Carioca – MAR Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro, BR)
Panorama 21 - Les revenants - Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains (Turcoing, FR)
Festival Mondes Possibles - Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers (Paris, FR)
(São Paulo, BR)
Ensaio de Tração - Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (São Paulo, BR)
Permanências e destruições - Torre H (Rio de Janeiro, BR)
Bolsa Pampulha - Museu de Arte da Pampulha (Belo Horizonte, BR)
Hipótese e horizonte - Observatório - (São Paulo, BR)
4º Prêmio EDP nas Artes – Instituto Tomie Ohtake (São Paulo, BR)
Estado de Suspensão – Coletor (São Paulo, BR)
I am molten matter sliding out of the insides of earth to tell you inner things: marks a shift in Janaina Wagner's work. The exhibition transports to physical space the perceptual and conceptual operations that structure the film When the Second Sun Arrives / A Comet in Your Eyes (2025), presented at MASP, concluding the trilogy that began with Curupira and the Machine of the Destiny (2021) and Quebrante (2024). The film project, loosely inspired by Spiral Jetty (Robert Smithson, 1972), Autobiography of Red (Anne Carson, 1998), and The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein (Marguerite Duras, 1964), articulates a set of references ranging from conceptual art to mythical literature, constructing an investigation into the image as an entropic field — a place where time is distorted.
Cimento, areia, ferro, óleo, cera de abelha e grafite [Cement, sand, iron, oil, beeswax and graphite]
130 x 95 x 3 cm
Chumbo e ferro [Lead and iron]
74 x 52 x 50 cm
| Sol e cometa (da série de storyboards), 2025 Latão fundido e pedra [Cast brass and stone] 48 x 150 x 112 cm |
Hastes metálicas, ferro/aço/arame galvanizado [Metal rods iron/steel/galvanized wire]
Latão fundido e ferro [Cast brass and iron]
70 x 60 x 175 cm
Ferro e óleo sobre papel fibra de bambu [Iron and oil on bamboo fiber paper]
285 x 250 cm
Cimento, areia, ferro, óleo e grafite [Cement, sand, iron, oil and graphite]
90 x 130 x 4 cm
Pedras, ferro, chumbo, vidro e lâmpada de led [Stones, iron, lead, glass and LED lamp]
34 x 86 x 120 cm
Pedras, ferro, chumbo, vidro e lâmpada de led [Stones, iron, lead, glass and LED lamp]
91 x 83 x 3 cm
Happening
Cast brass, stone and fire with microphones
With Pontogor
I am molten matter sliding out of the insides of earth to tell you inner things: marks a shift in Janaina Wagner's work. The exhibition transports to physical space the perceptual and conceptual operations that structure the film When the Second Sun Arrives / A Comet in Your Eyes (2025), presented at MASP, concluding the trilogy that began with Curupira and the Machine of the Destiny (2021) and Quebrante (2024). The film project, loosely inspired by Spiral Jetty (Robert Smithson, 1972), Autobiography of Red (Anne Carson, 1998), and The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein (Marguerite Duras, 1964), articulates a set of references ranging from conceptual art to mythical literature, constructing an investigation into the image as an entropic field — a place where time is distorted.
The territorial and symbolic axis of this research is the BR-230, the Trans-Amazonian Highway — a monumental trace inscribed on the body of the country during the civil-military dictatorship — which in Wagner appears as a geological and political wound. The road, the ultimate symbol of developmentalist discourse, becomes in her work a line of erosion, a fracture that exposes the underground of narratives of progress and its occupation of space. The artist contrasts the monumentality of infrastructure with the fragmented time of matter and imagination: dust, sediment, residue.
The film When the Second Sun Arrives / A Comet in Your Eyes proposes a cosmological and temporal inversion, where traces of the contemporary go back to prehistory. The gesture, clearly influenced by Smithsonian heritage, replaces historical linearity with entropic reversibility. For Wagner, entropy is a principle of indeterminacy that interrupts the teleological logic of progress, establishing a regime that does not develop, but dissipates.
The exhibition presented at Sardenberg extends this operation in another register. The set of eight sculptures and a performance — Um cometa nos teus olhos (A comet in your eyes)—does not illustrate the film, but rewrites it under a material grammar, in the form of an anti-storyboard of the film. Arranged on the floor, the sculptures reject the verticality of classical sculpture and establish a horizontality that refers both to geological sedimentation and gravitational collapse. Each form rests, but in a state of latency, as if awaiting the moment of combustion. This tension between rest and energy defines Wagner's formal field while referring to the imagery of the film that inspires it and is inspired by it.
The performance, announced as the arrival of a burning comet, accomplishes the passage from image to matter. Imagination becomes a physical event—a thermal phenomenon. Fire is not an expressive effect, but a structuring process: ways of reconfiguring the perception of form. By insisting on the instability of matter, Wagner introduces a sculptural regime in which heat and time are the true compositional agents of imagination.
The formal vocabulary of her work, both in thought and in the act of reflecting between the filmic image and the construction of a sculptural narrative, could be called here constructive entropy — a form that organizes itself by the very entropic logic that threatens it. Rather than an established concept, it is a critical hypothesis for understanding that form is constituted as it dissipates. If Smithson saw entropy as a mirror of the industrial landscape, Wagner reinscribes it on the horizon of the Capitalocene, where matter and crisis become indistinguishable. Her work does not denounce catastrophe. Janaina incorporates it as an observer and as a problem of method and poetry.
In this sense, I am molten matter sliding out of the insides of earth to tell you inner things: it is less a metaphor for the end of the world than a reflection on our condition in the face of contemporary form—a form subject to the same forces of dissipation and repression that define the present. Between the solid and the incandescent, the cosmic and the domestic, the visible and the formless, Wagner constructs a sculpture of time: a storyboard that activates reality as imagination, and, in this movement, restores the possibility of seeing.
Ricardo Sardenberg