IEA and ZiF promote the exhibition "Grace at the boundary of knowledge" at the MariAntonia Center

The exhibition Grace at the boundary of knowledge, by artist Sandra Boeschenstein, will be inaugurated  at 11:00 am on August 6,at the University of São Paulo’s MariAntonia Cultural Center. With free admission, it will run until November 20 and will be open to the public from Tuesday to Sunday and on holidays from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm. At the opening, at 12:00 pm, there will be a conversation between the artist and the Brazilian curator.

Curated by Martin Grossmann former director of the Institute for Advanced Studies of the University of São Paulo (IEA-USP) and Britta Padberg, former executive director of  Bielefeld University's Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), the exhibition showcases an "unregulated encounter of things, images, and words that unleashes the qualities and potentials of media." Boeschenstein's attention is focused on these transitions and on the ways of experiencing them. According to the organizers, "the exhibition is a continuum of intertwined gestures, placing the act of perception at the center and making visible the dynamic nature of meanings."

"In this case, the MariAntonia Cultural Center becomes an interactive extension of this interdisciplinary platform that is USP’s Institute for Advanced Studies  by providing the ambience and the necessary complementarity for its realization. This partnership, whether with MariAntonia or with the ZIF, further enhances this ambitious mission of fostering  encounters  of different cultures, knowledges, disciplines, and practices that the IEA has been carrying out throughout its 35 years of life," explains Grossmann.

Whether for her singular investment in the language of drawing, in expanded mode, or for her remarkable participations in other Institutes of Advanced Study in Europe interacting in equivalence with scientists, intellectuals of different matrices, Sandra Boeschenstein with her daring drawings, provokes reactions and questionings of the most diverse forms.

Grace at the boundary of knowledge establishes a kind of game with the visitor, however, the pieces, the board (the spatiality), the rules and the references are not objectively delineated. Warning: the experience causes strangeness, displacement, questioning, fundamental to the updating and expansion of knowledge.

The activity is a cooperation between the ZiF and the IEA. Support is provided by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, IEA's research group Fórum Permanente, Swiss general consulate in São Paulo and USP's Office of the Provost for Culture and Extension (PRCEU).

The artist

Sandra Boeschenstein is a visual artist who lives and works in Zurich. She studied Philosophy and Art History at the University of Zurich for a year and graduated as an artist from the University of Arts in Bern in 1995.

Through drawing, she proposes to seek knowledge and explore the interaction between perception and thought, exploring the border between tangible and intangible, between image and language, and between information and poetry. Over the past few years, Boeschenstein has expanded her drawing on paper to drawings on walls, in which she arranges real objects that relate to the images and lines in space.

“When is something and how does it accrue meaning? How do the situation, the image, and language touch each other? What is the appearance of a knowledge beckoning between material, picture, and language and that cannot be further extracted? Bringing light into darkness is simpler than darkness into light. The boundary of knowledge forms in the hierarchy-free play of these two actions. This is work with both the constructing and the decaying energies of meanings”

Sandra Boeschenstein