Lara Barbosa

Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Thesis - Restricted Access (SIA Only)

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Contemporary Art

First Advisor

Agnes Berecz

Second Advisor

Maria Sancho-Arroyo

Abstract

This thesis examines the 1969 boycott of the 10th São Paulo Bienal as a pivotal moment in understanding the role of art under authoritarianism. It argues that the Bienal, founded in 1951 as a symbol of Brazil’s modernity and international cultural ambition, became, under the military dictatorship, an ideological instrument that projected an image of progress while concealing state repression. The boycott, initiated by Brazilian artists and supported internationally, exposed how cultural institutions could serve as vehicles of power, transforming art into a tool of propaganda and spectatorship into passive complicity. Through the frameworks of Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, and bell hooks, the thesis situates the Bienal within broader debates about ideology, spectacle, and marginality, questioning when participation becomes collaboration and when refusal becomes resistance. The boycott marked not an absence of artistic production but a redirection of it – toward more experimental, ephemeral, and socially engaged practices that redefined Brazilian avant-garde art. Artists who withdrew from official institutions turned instead to the streets, the body, and the everyday as spaces of intervention, forging new languages of critique that challenged both state power and the boundaries of art itself. Ultimately, this thesis contends that the boycott’s enduring significance lies in its redefinition of artistic agency under repression: it demonstrated that art’s most radical potential emerges not through institutional visibility, but through its ability to interrupt, reveal, and resist the mechanisms of control that seek to contain it.

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