Museo Jumex presents Jonathas de Andrade: Visões do Nordeste (Visions of the Nordeste), his first solo presentation in Mexico featuring three of his most recent works that evidence his interest in the northeastern region of Brazil, better known as the Nordeste.

Two videos, O Peixe (The Fish) (2016), and O Caseiro (The Housekeeper) (2016), compliment each other to reveal the artist’s blurring of fiction and reality as a tool to examine issues of labor, class, and race embedded in Brazilian culture. On the other hand, the photographs of ABC da Cana (Sugarcane ABC) (2014) embody the empowerment of workers through their appropriation of the alphabet.

For the past decade Jonathas de Andrade has produced works that look closely at the construction of Brazilian national identity. Using photography, video, and installation, the artist draws together different perspectives, historical moments, and references to draw attention to universal issues such as race, class, labor, and the nature of oppression. At the same time, he provides a local perspective by situating his works in the context of his native region of the Nordeste. De Andrade brings us closer to an understanding of the persistence of these problems in Brazil but also in Latin America where modernity constantly reveals itself as the perpetuation of our colonial condition.