Yuli Yamagata: Ghosts Don’t Wear Watches

Yuli Yamagata was born in São Paulo, where the Brazilian avant-garde was born in the 1922 Week of Modern Art. Self-conscious, cynical about its possibilities, Modernismo was charged with irony and dark humor; the poet Oswald de Andrade founded a magazine he called the Anthropophagy Manifesto to define the relationship between Brazilian and European culture. Brazilians, he asserted, would cannibalistically eat European culture. But it was a woman, Oswald’s then-wife Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973), who gave the movement its icon by painting Abaporú (1928), “man who eats people” in the language of the Tupi-Guarani people. The irreverence of that movement achieves a new life in Yuli Yamagata; if the modernistas appeared at Brazil’s centenary in 1922, Yamagata comes along one century later to express the Brazil of her times: cosmopolitan, polyglot, and pluricultural.

This is Yamagata’s third show with Anton Kern, and she has filled two floors of the gallery with floor sculptures, wall pieces, a mobile, and a video starring an outcast snail, Frooty Looping Serial Death (all works 2024). If the modernistas of the twenties defined themselves through an act—deglutition—Yamagata defines herself through interrelated processes: eating, sex, digestion, and death. Metamorphosis, usually at a dizzying speed, lies at the center of her esthetic.