• Accessibility
      Font
    • A+
    • Aa


  • Events
  • Search
  • en
    • pt
  • Bienal
  • About Us
  • From Bienal to Bienal
  • Events
  • +Bienal
  • Library
  • Historical Archive
  • Partners
  • Transparency
  • Bienal Café
  • Contact us
  • Press
  • Visual Identity
Home News Live Uncertainty is the title of 32nd Bienal

8 Dec 2015

Live Uncertainty is the title of 32nd Bienal

Poster of the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo
Poster of the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo ©Design Bienal: Aninha de Carvalho, Adriano Campos and Roman Atamanczuk

The 32nd Bienal de São Paulo means to reflect on the current conditions of life and the strategies offered by contemporary art to harbor or inhabit uncertainty. The exhibition will be held from September 7 to December 11, 2016 at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, featuring approximately 90 artists and collectives, 54 of which are announced here.

Live Uncertainty

Titled Incerteza viva [Live Uncertainty], the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo will focus on notions of uncertainty to reflect on the current conditions of life and the strategies offered by contemporary art to harbor or inhabit uncertainties. The exhibition sets out to trace cosmological thinking, ambient and collective intelligence, and systemic and natural ecologies.

In order to objectively confront the big questions of our time, such as global warming and its impact on our habitats, the extinction of species and the loss of biological and cultural diversity, economic and political instability, injustice in the distribution of the Earth’s natural resources and global migration, among others, perhaps it’s necessary to detach uncertainty from fear. Uncertainty is clearly connected to notions endemic to the body and the earth, with a viral quality in organisms and ecosystems. Though it is related to the word crisis, it is not equivalent to it. Uncertainty is, above all, a psychological condition linked to individual or collective decision-making processes, describing the understanding and non-understanding of concrete problems.

The notion of uncertainty is part of the repertoire of many disciplines – from mathematics to astronomy, and also including linguistics, biology, sociology, anthropology, history and education. Unlike what goes on in other fields, though, uncertainty in art points to disorder, taking into account ambiguity and contradiction. Art feeds off uncertainty, chance, improvisation, speculation and, at the same time, it attempts to count the uncountable and measure the immeasurable. It makes room for error, for doubt and even for ghosts and the most profound misgivings, without evading or manipulating them. Would it not make sense then to take art’s numerous methods of reasoning and making and apply them to other fields of public life?

Learning to live with uncertainty can teach us solutions. Understanding the significance of Live Uncertainty on a day-to-day basis means remaining aware of the fact that we exist immersed in an environment that is ruled by it. As such, we can propose other means of action in times of constant change. Discussing uncertainty requires an understanding of the diversity of knowledge, because describing the unknown always implies to interrogate what we take for granted as known. And yet it also means valuing scientific and symbolic codes as complementary rather than exclusionary. Art promotes an active exchange between people, recognizing uncertainties as guiding generative and constructive systems.

32nd Bienal de São Paulo – Incerteza viva [Live Uncertainty]
September 7 – December 11, 2016
Curator: Jochen Volz
Co-curators: Gabi Ngcobo, Júlia Rebouças, Lars Bang Larsen and Sofía Olascoaga

  

  

Study Days inaugurate 32nd Bienal’s public activities

32nd Bienal’s architectural project dialogues with Ibirapuera Park

List of artists

Read too


Access +bienal
Document-feather-cotton thread delivered by the artist Gustavo Caboco Wapichana to the Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo
News14 May 2025

‘Living’ archives and the memory that is rebuilt

Based on research at the Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo, Gustavo Caboco Wapichana and Tipuici Manoki wondered about Indigenous absence in contemporary art archives. Researcher Marilúcia Bottallo looks at the results of this research and explores other aspects of this process.

Learn more
Portrait of Wanda Svevo. Photo: Unknown authorship
Interviews29 Apr 2025

Wanda Svevo: a family profile

Based on an interview with Alberto Svevo – son of Wanda Svevo, the founder of the Bienal Archive – we put together a profile of his mother from an intimate point of view.

Learn more
Detail view of Templo de Oxalá, by Rubem Valentim, during the 35th Bienal de São Paulo – choreographies of the impossible © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo
Articles15 Apr 2025

Wall as Support: Rubem Valentim’s Templo de Oxalá

Researcher Bruno Pinheiro revisits the emblematic installation presented by Rubem Valentim at the 14th Bienal de São Paulo, in 1977, and analyzes how the work articulates Afro-Brazilian spirituality, sacred geometry and modernist architecture, projecting a space of resistance and reflection that gains new strength with its reassembly at the 35th Bienal.

Learn more

Newsletter

Subscribe to the Bienal newsletter

Bienal

  • About Us
  • From Bienal to Bienal
  • Events
  • +Bienal
  • Library
  • Partners
  • Bienal Café
  • Transparency

  • Contact us
  • Visual Identity

Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

Av. Pedro Álvares Cabral, s/n - Moema CEP 04094-050 / São Paulo - SP

Contact

+55 11 5576.7600 contato@bienal.org.br

Privacy
•
Terms of use
Copyright © 2025 Bienal de São Paulo
Ao clicar em "Concordar", você concorda com uso de cookies para melhorar e personalizar sua experiência, bem como nossa Política de Privacidade. Ver a Política de Privacidade*.
Concordar