Sem tìtulo [Untitled]

Paulo Nazareth’s piece Sem título [Untitled] is taken from an extended performance, Notícias de América, a three-year voyage that took him from his home in Belo Horizonte, Brazil to New York City. During this odyssey, Nazareth did not wash his feet, allowing the ground of each country he crossed to accumulate on them. Upon arriving in New York City, he symbolically connected the Americas by dipping his feet in the Hudson Rover, thus marking the end of his performance. In this photographic self-portrait, we can see the phrase ”my image of exotic man for sale”. Nazareth thus asks us to think about immigration, racialisation, globalisation, and colonialism.

By rejecting conventional narratives and embracing the raw authenticity of his experiences, Paulo Nazareth confronts the commodification of exoticism and offers us a poignant critique of the mechanisms that perpetuate such constructs. Through his art and his voyage, Nazareth turns established paradigms on their head and invites viewers to reassess their understanding of themselves, society, and the world as a whole.

The Pinault Collection showed this work for the first at the Icones exhibition at Punta della Dogana in Venice in 2023