When the necessity to think and create flows in your blood, you have to put the urge to good use. Bet Olival chose to do it with art. “Being involved with art is like [entering] a tunnel without end,” the Brazilian artist says. “You do not want to get out, no matter how deep you go.”
Olival believes art fulfils the soul and is a challenge that builds a conversation between the artist and his or her work. “Even if you just draw an object on a piece of paper, this drawing will make you think [of it] as an object that you have transferred [on to the] paper. You can contextualise the object’s function, [its] colours [and] the decisions you make about that drawing.”
At the outset, Olival’s artistic concerns revolved around painting — she did her graduation in architecture and followed it up with a masters in visual arts. But, as architects have an idea of space, Olival’s application of three-dimensional effects went beyond the canvas and into the world of sculptural designs with evocative context.
Unseen perspective
Today, Olival’s artwork brings an intimate and discrete universe to the public realm. Her art is not for those with a random approach to the subject. People who observe its beauty and correspond well to its inquiries will find that her creations relate to two mystifying themes: decontextualisation and recontextualisation.
“Our notions about what we have been hearing since we were children and what comes to our minds when we are in a room with an artwork is all that we know. And this gets modified when we feel what was far is now closer; we are inside the story.”
Olival endeavours to transfer the appropriate narrative structures of fictional literature, cartography and a constructed space to the production of contemporary artistic work using diverse forms of expression — installations, photographs and sculptures.
In a way the deconstruction and reconstruction, she says, present a new issue about those narrative structures. Olival’s installations do not partake in the chro-matic “Carnaval-ising”. This has rarely been successful in the history of sculpture and painting in Brazil, except for the festive parades of samba school and folkloric groups.
“We have a diversity of Brazilian artists dealing with the heritage of the Concretism,” Olival says. “We have Portuguese and Spanish influence in our culture. We also have the natives — the slaves from Africa. All these elements have deeply influenced our culture and art.”
This heterogeneity gives Olival an “open” option to go deep as an artist and interrogate the viewer about art. She believes that artists nowadays do not have a style. “What happens around us can be re-contextualised. [It] gives us ways to make decisions with attitude. And that attitude is the style,” she says.
Coming to the The Sleeping Beauty and The Lovers — her series to be exhibited in Abu Dhabi — Olival says: “In this series, I deconstructed the narratives to exhibit another meaning, making the viewer think. Their observations and memories will make them contextualise what they see.”
The media she uses to abide by her concept are as varied as her necessities. She says: “The forms of the Sleeping Beauty installation play with the opposites, and the materials ... are conductors of feeling and brace for the fight of the opposites — opaque and transparent, bright and dull, soft and hard, rigid and flexible.
It is the presence of these questions symbolically articulating the work, and not its formal use, that attests to the intelligence and integrity of the installation.
“All the choices we make should be based on our art process,” she says, adding that if one defends his choices like artist Marcel Duchamp, even air can be the best medium.
To surround the viewer with a dreamy ambience, Olival enhances the installation’s surroundings with green effects. “Green is the colour [of] mosques at night,” she reasons.
“At first I [felt] insecure [about] exhibiting this work in
a Muslim country, as my installations are based on a Western narrative. But if I can make people think, I am happy with my work.”
Professor of art history Paulo Sergio Duarte had once said of Olival: “The ability with which she solves the problem of dimensions of each work is a surprise [just] as how these measures … involve and relate to the body of the observer [is].”
Olival is at present working on Legends — a book that will compile 90 of her unpublished photographs and short texts. It would offer an insight into the role of women in the Orient.
The photographs, taken between 2001 and 2007, are a reflection of the artist’s extensive travels around Kuwait, Bahrain, Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Abounding in plasticity and metaphors, the pictures shed new light on the local culture by examining it from the conceptual standpoint of contemporary Western art. The frames teem with socio-anthropological content.
Changing perspectives
“The book records an impression of the reality of the Middle East from my viewpoint. I gave art classes in colleges and galleries throughout the region in which I traded experiences with women of various age groups, in a social context that contrasts with that of Western society.
“Interviewing, recording, filming, photographing and accumulating objects … I assembled my observations and experiences of the socio-cultural and contemporary art context. The situations are structured, creating poetic and narrative extensions and opening up windows for new approaches. I call them legends. It is a kind of contemporary 1001 Arabian Nights.”
If the spectators were to take away one thought from experiencing her creativity, what would it be? “I do not like to convey anything through my art,” Olival says. “I do my work with love and passion. People can make a reading about the way I see things and [the] situations. Even if they do not like [the works], they can think why they did not like it. And if I reach that point, I believe my work is speaking with the viewer.”
The first Brazilian contemporary art show displaying The Sleeping Beauty and The Lovers art series of artist Bet Olival will be on at the Ibn Dhaher Hall, Cultural Foundation, Abu Dhabi, from April 7 to April 16.
Layla Haroon is a writer based in Abu Dhabi.
