Anna Bella Geiger is one of the most prominent artists working in Brazil today and a pioneer of conceptual and video art in South America. Throughout her career, she has worked in a diverse range of mediums including painting, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, photography, photomontage, photocopies, video, and pedagogic practices. Through multiple languages and materials, she has affirmed her commitment to critical rhetoric and a feminist exploration of the world, beginning with informal abstraction in the early 1950s and evolving to engage with representations of the body and the self, as well as Brazil’s history, cultural identity, and political struggles. Since the 1970s, maps and geographies have occupied Geiger’s work. Informed by her experiences as a migrant and a subject to state violence, Geiger developed an interest in subverting the descriptive meanings of maps and transforming them into ideological propositions. In the series Mapas elementares 1, 2, and 3, the artist’s naked torso can be seen as she draws maps of Brazil, appearing alongside other recurring elements such as geometric grids, distorted planispheres, and anamorphic outlines of South America that become a crutch, an amulet, and a woman. These works are a testament to Geiger’s critical reflection on social, political, ideological, and cultural realities, sustaining her longstanding quest to rewrite an inherited world order by transforming the meaning of territory itself.
Mapas elementares no. 2, 1976. video (b&w, sound), 4 min 16 sec
Mapas elementares no. 3, 1976. video (b&w, sound), 3 min
