Regina Vater

Critical text

The fruit of ‘German, Portuguese, Native-American, Basque, Jewish, and Swiss blood’, the Carioca artist Regina Vater (b. 1943, Rio de Janeiro) places Brazilian culture and context at the centre of her œuvre. Through photography, visual poetry, performance, and installations, she interrogates both the temporal and the spiritual realms: while iconic pieces such as ‘Tina America’—a photographic performance in which the artist enacted stereotypical female characters—questioned the socialisation of Latin American women, a great part of her work draws inspiration from ritualistic Afro-Brazilian practices and mythologies, exploring the relationship with time and the environment through the lens of the sacred. After moving to New York, where she met key cultural figures such as Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, and throughout Europe in the 1970s, she settled in Austin, Texas, in 1985, where she put together the first exhibition devoted to Brazilian Visual Poetry in the United States, at the Mexic-Arte Museum in 2002. As both an artist and curator—organising multiple shows dedicated to her home country’s cultural production since the late 1970s—Vater has been instrumental in bringing Latin American art to the forefront of the international art scene.

Text by Mouna Mekouar