| talks and lectures

Kate Hamburger Research Center

2023, December

In her lecture for the Lunch Time Colloquium at the Käte Hamburger Research Center global dis:connect, Sabrina Moura delves into the intertwining of historical and curatorial practices in her work in Munich. Her presentation, titled "Images of the Past, Questions of the Present," adopts a nonlinear approach to explore narratives spanning from the 19th century to today. She begins with a fictional excerpt from Micheliny Verunschk's 2021 novel, "The Sound of the Jaguar’s Roar," which illuminates the search for Indigenous roots against the backdrop of a Brasiliana collection exhibition in São Paulo. This narrative transitions into the historical context of two Bavarian scientists, Spix and Martius, who, commissioned by the King of Bavaria in 1817, documented Brazilian natural history and tragically brought two Indigenous children to Germany. Moura highlights how these stories have been remembered, often sanitized, through monuments and literature, and how contemporary artists and writers, like Verunschk, use fiction to fill the silences in historical records. Her talk challenges us to reconsider the politics of memory and the role of archives, questioning how we can use artistic and historical narratives to shed light on marginalized voices and untold stories.

Inaugural lecture with Sabrina Moura (curator) and Malick Ndiaye (curator, Théodore Monod Museum, Dakar).

2021, May

The opening panel of the curatorial laboratory that is part of the exhibition "Archaeology of Creation: an immersion in the collection-studio of Rossini Perez" discusses the artist's work in the context of cultural relations between Brazil and Senegal in the 1970s. On this occasion, Sabrina Moura and Malick Ndiaye will also explore the possibilities of research and networks of artistic cooperation between Africa and Brazil today.

Sharjah Art Foundation

2021, April

This presentation by Sabrina Moura, titled ‘On the Verge of Now’, analyses three recent biennial editions: Sharjah Biennial 14: ‘Leaving the Echo Chamber’ (2019), 33rd São Paulo Biennial: ‘Living Uncertainty’ (2016) and 20th Sydney Biennial: ‘The future is already here–it’s just not evenly distributed’ (2016). Moura presents research published in an essay bearing the same title that was commissioned for the March Meeting Papers. Selected through the March Meeting 2021 open call, the essays included in the March Meeting Papers expand on curator Okwui Enwezor’s influential thinking about the Biennial as a platform to engage with history, politics and society. 

Programa de Ação Cultural do Estado de São Paulo

2023, May

This video lecture presented by curator Sabrina Moura discusses curatorial practice as a form of knowledge production. From this perspective, curating is viewed as a set of practices that catalyze connections between "objects, images, processes, people, places, histories, and discourses," and do not necessarily result in a finished exhibition format. The lecture also presents curatorial proposals developed by figures such as Walter Zanini, Lina Bo Bardi, and Fred Wilson.

"Curating as Knowledge Production" is a project supported by the PROAC DIRETO grant and is presented by the Secretariat of Culture and Creative Economy of the State of São Paulo.

Instituto Moreira Salles, Rio de Janeiro

2020, Mar. 11

In this round table, curator Sabrina Moura, artist Aline Motta and researcher Mariana Muaze debate the way Marc Ferrez's work is seen and perceived through time. The approaches brought up by this discussion critically examine the worldview embodied in these images, while addressing some silenced aspects of colonial photographic imagery — specially the depictions of coffee farms and indigenous people. 

Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo

2020 Jan. 21

In this guided tour, I propose a walk through the Brazilian iteration of the exhibition Mediations, the greatest retrospective of American photographer Susan Meiselas (1948) — curated by Marta Gili, Pia Viewing and Carlos Guerra — which brings together works produced from the 1970s to the present day. 

Ema Klabin Foundation, São Paulo

2019, Dec. 5

In this lecture — the second in the series Museums and Identities — I analyse the origins and unfoldings of the new definition of a museum discussed by the General Assembly of the ICOM (International Council of Museums) in 2019. Here I point out intersections between new principles, policies and museological practices and the main issues that have permeated these institutional spaces in recent decades: from the educational turnaround and new expographic experiences to the repatriation of works and identity policies. 

Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo

2019, Oct. 15

At the opening of Susan Meiselas's Mediations exhibition, the American photographer talks with researcher Sabrina Moura about her career. Famous for her powerful photographs of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua in the late 1970s, Meiselas developed a work that has always pointed toward empathy and the construction of joint narratives covering a wide range of countries and themes, from war to issues of human rights, from cultural identity to the sex industry.

Centro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica, Rio

2019, June 1st

"The scientist, for Louis Agassiz, was a privileged being who would know how to unveil the divine plan through the scientific observation of nature," says historian Maria Helena Machado. It is from this supposedly neutral place that Agassiz elaborates his theory of racial hierarchization. In this meeting, curator Sabrina Moura talks to Machado and Sasha Huber about the contributions of history and art to rethink the flaws and intentions of scientific discourse.

Temporalities, Goethe-Institut Salvador

2019, May, 5th 

In this talk, presented in the framework of the symposium Temporalidades: História da Arte como História da Cultura, I have deployed some of the arguments introduced at the Emma Klabin Foundation (March, 2019), encompassing the political agenda behind the restitution debate.

Musée Théodore Monod, Dakar

2019, Apr. 4

In this keynote, presented in the framework of the Black Atlantic Volkswagen Summer School, I explored how the notion of African diaspora has been used as a framework for the reassessment of essentialized identity narratives in field of art history and curatorship, between the1980s and 2000s. For this, I examine the emergence of the concept in the field of cultural studies and how it served as a tool for unsettling the narratives of belonging associated to nation and ethnicity. Such contextualization provided a ground for the analysis of the dilemmas introduced by a diasporic perspective in relation to the field of African art and the local-global art discourse.

Emma Klabin Foundation

2019, March 16

In November 2017, Emmanuel Macron announced his desire to restore African works of art looted during the French colonization. This issue appears on the agenda with the launch of the report that reiterates the proposal of the French president, prepared by researchers Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr. This is a global agenda that crosses not only the field of art, but also the way in which contemporary identity policies are constructed and understood. What are the notions of art and heritage that guide these proposals? What political agendas do they reveal (or hide)? How do they affect the field of curatorship and art history?

École normale supérieure, Paris

2018, Oct 4

In this lecture, I addressed the meanings and interpretations of a diasporic mythology in the work of Cuban-American artist Maria Campos-Pons. While anchored in vague images, these narratives offer an important key for grasping artistic practices constituted through axes of mobility, in which the sense of belonging extrapolate definite geopolitical contours. Likewise, the evocative force of the “return” imagery brought by Campos-Pons is constitutive of the modern Atlantic experience and has a long discursive trajectory. 

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

2017, Nov.

In the 1960s, Senegal played the role of cultural exponent in the African continent, while seeking to build its modernity under the sign of négritude, as idealized by the président-poète Léopold Sédar Senghor. By taking the field of arts and culture as a driving force behind Senegal’s national project, Senghor fostered an infrastructure consisting of museums, theaters and schools, including the École des Arts du Senegal, also known as the Dakar School. With a vision of modernity that sought to be “authentically African” and “universally resonant”, its pedagogical project echoed the Senghorian dialectic of “rootedness and openness” (enracinement et ouverture).

Mercosur Biennial, Porto Alegre

2018, March

The Mercosur Biennial was for some years a platform with a central educational project, where the figure of the pedagogical curator emerged as someone who thought and discussed the contents of the exhibitions/mediations, along with the other curators. In 2018, I was happy to contribute to Biennial's mediation program, discussing about African contemporary art with their curators and producers (Bianca Bernardo, Renata Sampaio, Andressa Cantergiani).