Leila Danziger
1962 | Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Lives in Rio de Janeiro
Artist, poet and professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), PhD in art history from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. Based on historical documents such as old newspapers, photographs and textbooks, her works explore the relationship between memory and oblivion, using multiple techniques and materials such as prints, texts, photolithographs and videos. She held individual exhibitions in institutions such as the Museu Judaico de São Paulo (2022); Caixa Cultural, São Paulo and Brasília (2019); and participated in group shows in such venues as the Otterbein University, Ohio, USA (2022); Goethe Institute Salvador (2020); and Museu de Arte do Rio (2019, 2018). In recent years, she published the books "Descer da nuvem" (2022) and "Navio de emigrantes" (2019). She lives in Rio de Janeiro.
O que desaparece, o que resiste, 2023
Installation
The installation is organized inside a newsstand. The memory of street vendors and hawkers surrounds the proposal. In the newsstand, Danziger presents the Diários Públicos [Public Diaries] series, which she has been producing since 2001, comprising around one hundred newspaper pages erased by means of an extractive method that removes the first layer of paper without tearing it. Three video works are also presented in the newsstand—Diários Públicos, Vanitas and When the Man's Castle Is a Storage Room—based on the gesture of erasing newspapers. Danziger’s work is a reflection on the passage of time and the construction of narratives and silences that elaborates the tension of the inextricable relationship between memory and forgetfulness. Her ruined information paradoxically suggests that forgetting can be a hygienic and healthy measure in the face of the informative, and so often useless, mass from the media, which puts experience and meaning, always so precarious and provisional, at the mercy of forgetfulness.