Having moved to “the capital of Europe” just last August, I approached the 14th edition of Brussels Gallery Weekend (BGW) aiming not to reckon with changes in the city’s cultural landscape, or discern the features of a much-touted “new normal,” but to focus on the present. I started with “Generation Brussels,” an exhibition of young Brussels-based artists without gallery representation, sponsored by BGW since 2018. Spread across two venues, the thematic focal points this year were gender, identity, space, and environment. In their curatorial statement, Dagmar Dirkx and Zeynep Kubat declared individualism dead, lauded collaboration, and opposed binary divisions (nature/culture, artist/curator, etc.). This overly familiar discourse and thematic framework belied the curators’ sensitivity in arranging a true medley of mixed-media installations, videos, photographs, and textile works, many of which seem to have been produced with the strictest economy of means. Amongst these, at the Tour à Plomb sports and culture center, Günbike Erdemir’s ramshackle burlap tent At the horizon of the evening of no return (2020) arose from the ground floor like some arcane pagan shelter, eerily lit and replete with small paintings of fantastical creatures and ritualistic scenes, pillows, and wooden bookstands built for reading on the floor. Upstairs, …

The past 10 years have seen an expansion in the recognition of Latin American artists worldwide, as well as a multiplication of the numbers of galleries and art-related events in Brazil, especially in São Paulo. Being so, a survey of the city’s growing number of contemporary art institutions such as galleries, museums, studios, and off-spaces can only be partly representative of the city’s vast landscape of art and culture. But a survey can nonetheless offer another view on the cultural life of Sao Paulo beyond the world’s second oldest biennial (after Venice, and founded in 1951), which has just opened it’s door to the public. While the Bienal is looking for the very contemporary in art today and doesn’t necessarily meet local expectations for its representation of Brazilian art, the city’s current gallery exhibitions present a consolidation of a Brazilian identity through art and its spaces. At CAIXA Cultural, in the rather dilapidated downtown of São Paulo, French artist Marie Voignier’s film Hinterland (2009) examines Tropical Island, the man-made bathing resort in Krausnick, a bleak and economically depressed region 60 km south of Berlin. Set in a heated dome that looks like a real-life Truman Show, the film deals with the …