Cao Guimarães

Video art, like no other artistic discipline, gives expression to social, political or personal issues and conflicts. While taking advantage of all the latest technology, it remains firmly rooted in the tradition of painting, photography and sculpture. The films of Cao Guimarães reflect in an exemplary manner the intense encounter and circulation between documentary and contemporary art, domains which until recently were distant and even mutually hostile. Cao Guimarães’ feature-length films are strongly marked by photography, experimental films and video installations, which the artist has carried out since the early 90s. The fact that his last documentary Drifters was chosen for the opening of the 27th São Paulo biennial in 2006, is yet another clue to the fertile porosity of frontiers between these two artistic fields.

In Guimarães’ movement from one field to the other, two aspects are emphasised: Firstly, the silent observation of the world practiced in photography and experimental films, which has been so well appropriated by the filmmaker in his depiction of workers in gradually extinct jobs. Secondly, the invention of certain devices for producing his work, evident in films such as Accident (2006) and Two-way Street (2003).

Through such key procedures, Guimarães utilizes various aesthetic, ethic and methodological characteristics of documentary filmmaking in order to depict solitary characters most often at the margins of capitalist modernity, even if pierced by it. He thus finds, in his own particular way, a certain contemporary cinema composed of long tracking shots made by filmmakers, such as Gus Van Sant, Abbas Kiarostami, Alexandre Soukourov and Mercedes Alvarez, who believe that film is constituted more by space-time blocks than by images in themselves. The temporal constructions in these films privilege the spectator’s sensorial acuity, proposing new sensitive experiences which imprint changes in our perception of the world.

“Cao Guimarães’ working process, employed since his first documentary, favours an unseen and concentrated attention to the small things of the world, beings, movements, gestures, sounds, noises, conversations.” (Ricardo Sardenberg, Time and Device in Cao Guimarães Films, 2007)

Cao Guimarães, filmmaker and visual artist, was born in 1965 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where he lives and works. He studied philosophy at the Federal University of Minas Gerais and completed a Masters of Arts in Photographic Studies at Westminster University of London. Since the end of the 1980s, he has been showing his work at various museums and galleries such as the Tate Modern, the Guggenheim Museum, CAB- Centro de Arte de Burgos, Gasworks, Frankfurten Kunstverein, Studio Guenzano, Galeria La Caja Negra and Galeria Nara Roesler. He was part of art biennials such as the XXV and XXVII São Paulo International Art Biennial and Insite Biennial 2005 (San Diego/ Tijuana). Some of his art pieces are part of public collections, such as the Fondation Cartier Pour L’art Contemporain, Tate Modern, Walker Art Center, Guggenheim Museum and Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo. His films have been awarded in several international festivals, including Locarno (2004 and 2006), Sundance (2007), Cannes (2005), Rotterdam (2005 and 2007), Rio (2001, 2004, 2005, 2006), São Paulo (2004 and 2006), International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam – IDFA (2004), It’s All True (2001, 2004 and 2005) and Cinema du Réel (2005).