The Brazilian artist Laura Lima is celebrated for challenging traditional notions of art and audience. By creating immersive environments that blur the boundaries between installation, sculpture, and performance art, her artworks often explore living matter—from humans and nature to the relationship between the body and space. With this dialogue, her multifaceted practice engages viewers in unique and sometimes unsettling ways. Early interactive works of Lima’s reveal her interest in philosophy and psychology—like Homem=carne/mulher=carne – Pelos + Rede, first shown in 1996, featuring a nude man and woman reclining in a hammock. While each body is treated as a form of a sculpture, their relationship is only defined by physical proximity, leaving much up to the audience’s imagination and interpretation.
Other large-scale installations, like that in her solo show “The Inverse” at ICA Miami in 2016, reveal site-specific abstractions and suspense. There, an industrial rope was braided and tangled around the building’s columns and support beams, dwindling in size until it merged with a female body on the floor, partially out of view. More recently, Lima’s interest in the natural world and belief histories was also seen in an exhibition named “How To Eat The Sun and The Moon” (March 15–April 24) at Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. Inspired by Brazilian folklore and imaginaries from the countryside, where she grew up, she made woven fabric pieces from threads dyed using natural plants and vegetables.
A similar work-in-progress installation of carefully woven threads was also seen at this year’s edition of Frieze New York, in A Gentil Carioca’s booth—a gallery she co-founded with the artists Marcio Botner and Ernesto Neto. Prompting ideas about labor intensity, visibility, ornamentation, and the human condition, it reflected constant transformation through its natural materials, with an artwork date set in the future.
Whitewall spoke with Lima about her latest presentations and how her two upcoming artworks will not be presented in a gallery or a fair, but in a forest.
Laura Lima, portrait by Maria Baigur.
WHITEWALL: Can you share details behind your presentation at Frieze New York?
LAURA LIMA: I started a work called Brown Drawing that was there. It’s threads that I weave, and then I put some pieces of coal in. The idea is that the threads are going to be stained in the future. If you manipulate the drawing, with something like humidity, the qualities of the air, the atmosphere, and the weather are very important. It makes you think about the landscape that you are in. If you go deeper, you will discuss ecology. If you have this certain humidity or ways to manipulate the drawing, it’s going to stain.
Every time that I do one of these raw drawings, I think they’re not ready, so I give them names for the future. I don’t allow the gallery or institutions to write the year that I wove them because they’re going to be ready in the future.
WW: So this was a work in progress?
LL: Yes. Sometimes I don’t see these drawings as being ready. I see them in the future—2030, for example.
The other works in the show came from this experience, but I kept the quality of weaving that is related to not doing something right, or something traditional. I work with my team, and we have this conversation all the time. We weave, and sometimes we dye them in colors, but since the first time I dyed them in industrial colors, I didn’t really like it. It felt like I was not doing what I wanted, so I stopped.
Laura Lima, “How to eat the Sun and the Moon,” Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2024, photo by Anthea Pokroy.
Studio Research and Inventions that Shape the Future
WW: You’ve been known to dye your fabrics in other ways, like boiling plants and making your own pigmented pastes. What kind of research goes into this in the studio?
LL: I do many different works in the studio. So this is one of the research that we do. So we have already lots of colors and combinations that we make in this catalog of different colors, combinations. The piece that you saw, we’ve been dyeing them and weaving. They have a particularity of being something. I relate them to a certain corporate idea of things that you find, but you don’t know exactly what they are. Are they drawings? Are they sculptures? Are they paintings? These would be the common questions inside of the artwork. But at the same time, they are something that you don’t know with all the colors that we invented there, this combination of food, if they will last. So we do them in a way that they’re also questioned in the future. Probably they are paintings that shape the future. And this is the quality of this painting or this drawing or this sculpture. They have lots of details in the back, even if they really feel like three-dimensional pieces. They have a pool of things in the back. So the way that you can be with the pieces, you can just turn them upside down because they are interconnected in one same energy of weaving.
I think to work with these kinds of ideas is touching. I’m thinking about what we decided to have in terms of the object and this idea that this dust graph may also tell you that something will last, and things are not really lasting. So time is very important as well.
Laura Lima, “The Objects We Choose,” Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, 2024, photo by Pierre Le Hors.
Choosing Meaning in Art and Life
WW: This focus is representative of your creative practice—thinking about time, humankind, animals, and the planet. Where did being interested in mortality and life come from? Do you feel your undergraduate studies in philosophy play into this?
LL: Yes. Even after 30 years of working, it’s more like choosing things that have more meaning. For example, I did this ballet of objects—“Balé Literal,” a retrospective at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona—and of course, the compositions were very important. How do you deal with certain matters, and also another matter? How are these things together? Is this thing going to last? Is this thing bringing us meaning about politics, about the way that we behave? Let’s say the result is a beautiful object, it’s much more the process of creating and asking what it’s about. I don’t know if I got there, but I think, “How should this be this way in life?” Or, “How is this in art? Why were we in a certain way, behaving in a certain situation in the art, in the institution of the museum? How can we do something different?” Sometimes I go to museums and turn off the lights. I want the landscape to light the exhibition. Of course, this is not only about the environment and the discussions that we are thinking about but also about the venues that we are in, the values and meanings we give to things, including in art—the common behavior in art, institutions, galleries, fairs, et cetera.
“Let’s say the result is a beautiful object, it’s much more the process of creating and asking what it’s about,”
Laura Lima
Laura Lima, “Balé Literal,” MACBA, 2023, Photo by Sílvia Poch.
Upcoming Projects Close to the Heart
WW: What are you working on this fall?
LL: Two things. I am doing a ballet, The Forest, with an institution here in Brazil that has a huge forest landscape. I’m thinking about how to manage new spaces that are not the normal institutions that do something inside of architecture. It’s going to be in the forest.
After that, I will start a work that is close to my heart. I’ve been collaborating with an institution that takes care of animals and releases them from the forest. I’ve been observing the techniques that they use in the last seven years. It’s an instrument to ask, “How can we construct tools to release animals, and take care of them in the forest?” It’s a difficult question, but we are going to construct a certain installation that communicates with them, but doesn’t create a problem to the forest environment. It has to be things that will be destroyed by the weather, not pieces taken from a gallery.
