On World Photography Day, the Museum of Art of Rio – MAR, under the Odeon Institute’s management – inaugurates Like dust in the wind | Photography in the MAR collection and presents to the public a photographic slice of its archive. Curated by Evandro Salles, Cultural Director of MAR, the exhibition gathers about 250 pieces by 112 artists, with works that range from the 19 th century till the present day. Included are names such as Marc Ferrez, Kurt Klagsbrunn, Pierre Verger, Walter Firmo, Evandro Teixeira, Luiz Braga, Rodrigo Braga, Marcos Bonisson and Rogério Reis, among others.

“Currently our collection numbers more than 6 thousand works, with around 2 thousand in the territory of image and, especially, of photographic language. The show brings this plurality of the archive, also gathering experiments in various platforms of the image, such as books, films, installations, paintings or performances, configuring the act of photography as a gesture capable of going beyond itself and, with this, demonstrating the force of production in historical and present-day terms,” remarked the curator.

The exhibition reverberates some of MAR’s significant branches that converse among themselves, which is the reason why the name is appropriated from an exhibited Dirceu Maués work, a video created from pin-hole photographs (produced by matchboxes transformed into cameras) of the market Ver-o- Peso in Belém, Pará. Works by Evandro Teixeira – which traverse the journeys of Graciliano Ramos and his most famous characters in Vidas Secas, of 1938, – and Jonathas de Andrade, with his ABC da Cana, of 2014, shed light on life in the northeastern desert. The dialogue of indigenous and Amazon-related issues, an important part of the MAR collection, arises from the Transamazônica series, photographed beginning in 1990, by Paula Sampaio, and the reflection of Berna Reale upon violence.

Historic photographs of Brazilian Modernism signed by Kurt Klagsbrunn and Pierre Verger portray a Rio de Janeiro of the 20th century, while contemporary artists investigate the city’s forms and characters – as in the collection Anônimos, of 2002, by Gustavo Malheiros and in the works of Bruno Veiga. The show even expands beyond the exhibit space with photographs from the Maré community’s Mão na Lata project, in a series inspired in the literature of Machado de Assis, realized between 2011 to 2013.

Completing the exhibition are works by photographers from the state of Minas Gerais which explore the rich architecture of the cities there and works which offer an inquiry into artists’ relations to their bodies.