Striking contradictions
Art exhibits latest flashpoints in Brazil’s cultural war
A couple of modern art exhibits and a play have become leading battlegrounds in a growing culture war in Brazil, a nation whose fame for barely there bikinis masks a rising trend of conservatism.
Protesters waved a Brazilian flag and shouted “No! No! Not our children!’’ to denounce an exhibit at Sao Paulo’s Museum of Modern Art in which visitors, including a child, were invited to touch a nude man. A bankbacked cultural centre bowed to pressure and cancelled a Queermuseu exhibit exploring sexual diversity — only to have prosecutors denounce the incident as censorship. And a play portraying Jesus as a transgender woman led protesters to leap on the stage. A judge ordered one performance halted, but was overruled by another court.
The outside world has long assumed Brazil is as wild as its famously minimal swimwear and the exuberant, anythinggoes Carnival celebrations. But many within the nation have always seen those as exceptions.
“In Brazil, we have a very ugly habit of sweeping everything under the carpet,’’ said Renata Carvalho, the actress who performs the one-woman show ‘The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven.’ This just sheds light on what people think. I think it’s excellent that the masks are falling.”
Brazil’s conservatism has been bolstered by the rise of evangelicals, a heavy-voting group that now accounts for one in five people — up from one in 20 a few decades ago in what is still the world’s most populous Catholic nation. Their fervour has been fed by a tidal wave of political corruption scandals that have led many Brazilians to believe the nation needs moral leadership.
Liberal activists have struggled to make Brazil a more open place for gays and women and they gained some traction during the left-leaning Workers’ Party governments that led Latin America’s largest nation between 2003 and 2016. But conservatives are fighting back — aided in part by the fact that corruption scandals weakened the leftist movement.
Evangelical lawmakers in Congress are pushing to ban abortion in all cases. The Supreme Court has ruled that some public schools can teach religion. A judge has waved aside objections from the nation’s top psychologists in ruling that homosexuality can be addressed with so-called conversion therapy and treated as an illness, though that was knocked down by higher courts.
The fight over art is the most visible battleground of late.
Conservative groups have launched campaigns against two art exhibits, “La Bete’’ at the Sao Paulo museum and the Queermuseu exhibit in the southern city of Porto Alegre.
Critics accused “La Bete’’ of promoting pedophilia and protests erupted when a video circulated online of a child touching the nude performance artist’s ankle and hand.