SAO PAULO.- Marking three decades since his death, the exhibition Requiem and vertigo pays tribute to the life and work of Rafael França (1957-1991). Ten videos by the artist, made between 1983 and 1991, are the guiding thread for an exploration of how vertigo (which, in his work, is requiem and eroticism) imposes a change in the bodies, which are dismantled, reassembled, crossed, fragmented, dissolved, sickened, they persist and they are pulverised like relics across images.

Rafael França’s work is recognised as one of the most coherent and systematic works among Brazilian artists who work with moving images. Leaving aside the use of video as a simple recording device, his work continued (and took even further) the experiments carried out by the video art pioneers of the 1960s. The narrative of his videos, elliptical and discontinuous, explored elements such as the absence of sync between sound and image, alternation between fast and slow cuts and images that are purposely blurry and out of focus. By making his friends, as well as himself, characters in his videos, Rafael França also expanded the limits of a fictional/ documental narrative.

The exhibition intends to celebrate Rafael França by presenting not only his works, but seeking to establish dialogues with the production of artists from his generation and also of previous and subsequent generations, in Brazil and abroad. Mário Ramiro and Hudinilson Jr (their partners in the 3Nós3 group), Leonilson, Alair Gomes, Letícia Parente, Luiz Roque, Bruno Mendonça, Fabiana Faleiros, Davi Pontes, Wallace Ferreira, Luis Frangella, David Wojnarowicz, Robert Mapplethorpe and Cibelle Cavalli Bastos. In addition to these artists, we propose to extend the dialogue with writers who were producing at the same time as França - Caio Fernando Abreu, Arnaldo Xavier, João Gilberto Noll, Ana Cristina César and Roberto Piva -, through selected excerpts from their books.

Today, his work belongs to collection such as Reina Sofia Museum (Madrid, Spain), Museum of Contemporary Art-USP (São Paulo), Museum of Modern Art (São Paulo), and Associação Videobrasil (São Paulo). His work was recently presented in important retrospective exhibitions such as: United by AIDS (Migros Museum, Zürich, 2019), Histories of Sexuality (MASP São Paulo, 2018), ExpoProjeção (SESC Pinheiros, São Paulo, 2014) and Speaking Out (MoMA New York, 1992).