Maria Thereza Alves

Maria Thereza Alves (1961, São Paulo, Brazil. She lives and works between Naples, Italy, and Berlin, Germany) establishes a dialogue between the museum and her thirty-year experience with indigenous communities in the Amazon region and in Mexico, presenting a critical reinterpretation of the existing Collections of American Arts and Cultures. In the new methodological Entrance of the Palazzo delle Scienze, Alves offers examples of her research in which she investigates colonial histories and the bias found in European anthropological studies. In addition, the artist has created and presented the intervention Non sono d’accordo / I Don’t Agree (2023) and selected, in dialogue with the museum, a series of artists, researchers and representatives from indigenous communities who are to collaborate in re-curating the Collections.

In her works and projects, Alves explores the conditions and life experiences of individuals and communities to tell stories that have historically been silenced. Her projects are rooted in research, developing from her interactions with the physical and social environments of the places where she either lives or has visited for exhibitions or residencies. While being aware of Western dichotomies separating nature and culture, art and politics, or art and everyday life, her artistic practice challenges such distinctions by choosing to create spaces, times of action and visibility for variously oppressed cultural groups. She achieves this through collaborative relational practices that require continuous movement across disciplinary and epistemic boundaries. In 1979, when Alves was a member of the International Indian Treaty Council, she gave an official presentation at the UN Human Rights Conference in Geneva on the human rights abuse suffered by Brazil’s indigenous population. Alves was also among the founders, in 1987, of the Partido Verde (Green Party) in São Paulo, Brazil and, in 1981, she became the US representative of the Brazilian Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers Party). In 2012, José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Union, invited Alves to participate in his special commission working on the formulation of a New Narrative for Europe. Alves has participated in numerous international exhibitions: (re)connecting.earth, the Geneva Biennale of Art and Urban Nature (2023); documenta 15 (2022); the Quito Panamerican Biennale (2021); the Ural Biennale (2021); the Sydney Biennale (2020); the Toronto Biennale (2019); Manifesta 12 in Palermo and Manifesta 7 in Trento; the Sharjah Biennial (2017); the São Paulo Biennial (2016, 2010); the Berlin Biennial (2014); dOCUMENTA(13) and the Taipei Biennial (2012); the Lyon Biennial (2009); the Guangzhou Triennial (2008) and the Havana Biennial (1986). Her solo exhibitions were hosted, among other locations, at the La Estación Gallery in Cuernavaca in 1990, on the banks of the Paraguay River between the borders of Bolivia and Brazil in 1992, and at the MUAC in Mexico City and the CAAC in Seville in 2015. Alves won the Vera List Prize for Art and Politics 2016-2018.