In 1953, Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa encountered the work of Indonesian painter Affandi at the 2nd Bienal de São Paulo. Writing about Torre Eiffel, the artist’s interpretation of the famous Parisian structure, Pedrosa proposed an approach based on affinity: in his representation of the Eiffel Tower, Affandi evoked the “chromatic impetus” of French painter Robert Delaunay, establishing “strange affinities.” In painting the tower, the Indonesian artist dissolved the “spiritual climate” and the “physical-geographical reality” that separate distant places. For Pedrosa, this was made possible by the contemporary sensibility shared by both Affandi and Delaunay. A decade later, the critic presented a selection of contemporary Indonesian art to the Brazilian public at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, highlighting Affandi’s work within the set.

Echoes and Mirages takes this encounter as a point of departure. As conceptual anchors, the notions of “echo” and “mirage” emphasize the effects of duplication of matter, which—through movement and refraction—generate resemblance within difference. The exhibition takes this moment of recognition—the echo of Delaunay in Affandi—as a way to bring together contemporary artistic productions, establishing connections between different contexts in Brazil and Southeast Asia. While Pedrosa’s triangulation was based on a stylistic affinity between two painters—prompting reflection on the act of recognition, or the will to recognize—it is the artwork that becomes an apparatus—a mediated object, an environment, or an object-environment relationship—that allows affinities between places, initially seen as distant, to materialize.

The exhibition considers the artwork as an apparatus capable of activating the poetic and critical work of recognition, in order to investigate the relationship between art as apparatus and ecological questions in an interconnected world. Through the mediations of the apparatus, ecologies are transfigured into idioms and forms—recognizable and interpretable translations across different contexts—echoes and mirages that foster a connective sensibility. From fictitious places composed of photographic juxtapositions, to the tropological resonances of encounters between colonial authorities and wild animals in Southeast Asia, to a technological entity that performs a plantation mourning song, the exhibition articulates different modes of interfacing art and ecology.

Echoes and Mirages is the second edition of the Transoceanic Perspectives program, a research initiative launched in 2023, conceived and coordinated by Yudi Rafael and presented by Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte, dedicated to investigating and connecting artistic practices and histories across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.