With an interest in the limits and meanings of communication, Sonia Andrade was one of the pioneers of video art in Brazil. Her production, however, is not limited to video art. It encompasses a multiplicity of media and topics manifested by the artist in her experimentations from different perspectives. Her art ranges from drawing to writing, from appropriation of objects to photography, from postcards to mail art, from image projection to installations and other forms of expression.
Her career was fueled in the 1970s by the historical and artistic context in Brazil. Together with a group of video art pioneers, Andrade produced highly charged poetic and critical videos that challenge the complex relationships between the methods of production, circulation, mediation, reception and commercialization, while remaining semantically contemporary. In some of her videos of the time, the artist makes reference to and subverts the language of TV: she inserts her female body in unexpected situations that seem to suggest a liberating violence, as if she were rebelling against the standards of behavior imposed by the dictatorial regime that haunted the Brazil of her time. The dialogue can also be established through objects and words, as in the iconic installation Hydragrammas (1978-1993). Andrade brings together a large number of objects, associates them to each other, photographs them, and then assigns a word to each of the reproductions, creating thus a vocabulary that attributes new meanings to the objects. In her most recent video installations (2001-2017), the artist relates crystals and stones to projections, motivated by the structural and symbolic issues regarding light and by the inflections generated in the encounter between image/representation and object/thing.
The total body of the artist’s work reveals the multiple layers of meaning to be gained from each individual work. The ethical-political dimension, the enigma of time, and the episodic and relational character become evident.
Sonia Andrade’s artwork is featured in the public collections of important institutions such as Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles, USA), Harvard Art Museums (Boston, USA), and Kunstgewerbemuseum (Zurich, Switzerland).
