On the upper floor of Punta della Dogana, Brazilian artist Paulo Nazareth invites visitors to follow him on his journeys. For over fifteen years he has traveled across the Americas and the African continent, often barefoot, treading the same ground as his ancestors who were enslaved and stripped of their shoes as a mark of subjugation. His practice, a form of performance in continuous becoming, reflects on how colonial cartography and systemic racism have shaped the landscapes of modernity. His deliberately slow movements become a mode of narration, the journey as a way of inscribing stories onto bodies, languages, and borders.

Curated by Fernanda Brenner, the exhibition takes its title from the Arabic al-jabr, “to set broken bones,” a gesture of repair that for Nazareth becomes a method for moving through the fractures of history. A line of salt runs through the galleries like a threshold. Gradually, the outline of a tumbeiro, a ghostly slave ship, emerges. Salt heals and corrodes, layering memory. Without a chronological order, the exhibition unfolds as stations within a single art-life performance, from Notícias de América to the simultaneous activation of Venice and Veneza in Brazil. In this building once devoted to counting goods, Nazareth questions what the ledgers failed to record.

Featured image: Paulo Nazareth, Antropologia do negro I and II, 2014
Pinault Collection – @ Paulo Nazareth