Alter-Heroes

Catalogue, website and visual communication designed for Alter-Heroes, a film exhibition that took place in MAC USP (Sao Paulo Contemporary Museum) in September 2014.

Curated by Maria do Carmo M. P. de Pontes and Daniela Capelato with assistance of Maria Catarina Duncan, Alter-Heroes invites the viewer to experience feature films and artworks that use moving image as support, presented in the same hybrid context: a dark room in a museum. The exhibition takes as a starting point the image of the superhero, examining the notions that arise from the character, such as its superpowers, secret identity and dualities.

The show was divided into two blocks of projections, taking place every Friday, Saturday and Sunday of September 2014 during the museum’s opening times. The first block presented a series of eight films and videos by contemporary artists that use superheroes (as image or concept) to approach multiple themes, like mass media, the cinema industry and homosexuality.

The artists in this segment are: Laurie Anderson, Dara Birnbaum, General Idea, Mike Kelley, Lewis Klahr, Bjørn Melhus, Nathaniel Mellors and Jordan Wolfson, many of whom had never been exhibited in Brazil before.
The second block presented films originally made to be projected in cinemas, by directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Luis Buñuel, Neville D’Almeida and Alfred Hitchcock, amongst many others. Rather than dealing directly with the superhero character, this segment examines ideas of duality that are at the heart of the superhero existence. The only exception was the classic Superman by Richard Donner (1978), a landmark of this genre and, in this exhibition, the film that launches the series.

Category: Exhibition Catalogue
Location: São Paulo, Brasil
Client: MAC São Paulo
Collaborators: Maria do Carmo M. P. de Pontes
Year: 2014
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104 pages
Edition of 1000
148x210mm (A5)
Colour Offset