Brazilian artist Rosângela Rennó’s first solo exhibition in the US, Cicatriz, comprised eighteen photographs and twelve texts, each inserted directly into the MOCA Grand Avenue gallery walls. The installation combined photography-related stories from journals and magazines in the artist’s “Universal Archive” (1992–2024) with found photos of jailhouse tattoos, selected from a massive medical archive of glass negatives at the State Penitentiary in the Carandiru Complex in São Paulo, Brazil. The images, shot between 1920 and 1940, classified each prisoner according to a number, physical traits, and body marks. For Cicatriz, Rennó had 1800 tattoo plates conserved and eighteen developed and printed. Crucially, she anonymized the prisoners and texts by cropping out identifying characteristics and replacing names with initials like X and Y. The installation highlighted both the early use of photography as a taxonomic, disciplinary force and the uneven means through which history is written or forgotten.
The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue.The first exhibition to be presented through MOCA’s Latin American Art Research and Exhibition Program, Cicatriz was also conceived as a part of the Focus Series (1992–1998), which was dedicated to presentations of distinct bodies of work by artists working in all media and featured a roster of distinguished local and international artists.
Focus Series: Rosângela Rennó: Cicatriz was organized by Alma Ruiz, Curatorial Assistant, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.