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The Brazilian artist Rosângela Rennó made two works for her exhibition "Ring" that relate to the Venetian walls of the Cypriot capital, Nicosia, with their bastions in the Turkish-occupied north, the Greek-Cypriot south, and the United Nations buffer zone. Her Venetian Tour Scrapbook, 2009, a sculptural hand-made book of photographs consisting of three sections, one for each geographic area, proves a fruitful starting point for the artist’s understanding of the fortified barrier, constructed in 1567. Rennó created Venetian Map, 2009, by asking 11 people to draw what they thought the walls looked like, translating these sketches into adhesive vinyl of different colors, and then attaching them to a satellite photograph of the area in question. The result is a tangled web provoking disorientation similar to what one feels when watching an unrelated work, the video Bouk (ring/loop), 2009, which Rennó filmed through a car window while making a circuit of the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean. This dreamlike travel document, with a soundtrack of traditional music from the island played backwards, has multiple layers of footage superimposed in a composite technique enhanced by the use of desaturated, changing hues. While not as sensorial, the video Vera Cruz, 2000-01, is a triumph in its own right. By combining scratched film leader with text from a script Rennó wrote based on a journal kept by the Portuguese explorers who "discovered" Brazil in 1500, the artist has devised a visually engaging solution to a conceptual artwork that might otherwise be tediously dry.

"Rosangela Renno" originally appeared in the April 2010 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' April 2010 Table of Contents.