Juliana Stein was born in Passo Fundo, south of Brazil in 1970. She graduated in Psychology from the University Federal of Paraná and lived in Italy for two years: in Venice and Florence where she studied drawing, watercolor and history of art. She began working with photography in the late 90’s.
Solo Exhibits:
2018 – It’s not clear until the night falls / Oscar Niemeyer Museum/Brazil
2014 – Darkest Water / Crone Galerie/Berlin/Germany
Group Exhibits:
2018 –Bienal Mercosul / Porto Alegre/Brazil
2018 –Sesc Paço da Liberdade /Curitiba/ Brazil
2017 –Luz Matéria /MON/Curitiba/ Brazil
2017 –Diálogo MAC/MON /Curitiba/ Brazil
2017 –Bienal Internacional de Curitiba / Brazil
2016 –Bienal SIARTE / La Paz/ Bolívia
2016 –Projéteis / Sim Galeria /Curitiba/ Brazil
2015 – Bienal Internacional de Curitiba / Brazil
2015 – Bienal de Assunção / Assunção / Paraguai
2015 – Fotografias do Acervo MAC / Curitiba / Brazil
2015 – Aquisições MON / Curitiba / Brazil
2014 – Biennal de Montevideo / Montevidéu / Uruguai
2014 – Crone Galerie / Berlim / Germany
2014 – Tupy or not tupy / Museu Oscar Niemeyer / Curitiba / Brazil
2014 – BRICS Oi Futuro / Rio de Janeiro – Brazil
2013 – 55. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte la Biennale di Venezia /Venice/Italy
2012 – Place of Residence / Shangai / China
2011 – Poetas en Tiempo de Escasez / Montevidéo/Uruguai
2010 – 29º Bienal de São Paulo /São Paulo/Brazil
2009 – Encontros da Imagem /Braga /Portugal
2009 – Bienal Vento Sul /Curitiba /Brazil
2008 – Fundação Cultural de Curitiba / Curitiba / Brazil
2007 – MAC / 62º Salão Paranaense / Curitiba/ Brasil
2007 – Fondazione Triennale di Milano / Milano / Italy
2005 – Carreau du Temple / Paris / France
2003 – Imagética -Fundação Cultural de Curitiba / Brazil
2003 – Fundação Cultural de Curitiba/ Brazil
2003 – Festival Internazionale di Roma / Roma / Italy
2003 – PhotoEspana Festival / Madrid / Spain
2003 – Itaú Cultural /exposição itinerante / Brazil
2002 – Itaú Cultural /São Paulo / Brazil
2001 – LangenloisM21 Project / Austria
2001 – Funarte / Rio de Janeiro / Brazil
2000 – III Bienal Internacional de Fotografia Cidade de Curitiba / Brazil
Awards:
2001 -Itaú Cultural
Publications:
BRICS–OI FUTURO –Rio de Janeiro 2014
BRASILIEN –STEIDL– Berlin /2013
PLACE OF RESIDENCE – SHANGART GALLERY– Shangai/2012
FOTOGRAFIA NO BRASIL – FUNARTE/2004
MAPEAMENTO NACIONAL DA PRODUÇÃO EMERGENTE – 2001/2003
Collections:
Museu Oscar Niemeyer, Curitiba, Brasil
Museu da Fotografia de Braga, Braga, Portugal
Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Curitiba, Brazil
Museum of 21 Century, Langenlois, Austria
Fundação Cultural de Curitiba, Curitiba, Brazil
On Juliana Stein’s works
At the International Biennial of Photography in Curitiba, the images of Juliana Stein received the special attention of Jean-François Couvreur, director of Maison Européenne de la Photographie, and of Philippe Dubois, photography critic, professor at the University of Liège and Master of Conferences at University of Paris. According to Philippe Dubois, the constructions and juxtapositions of Juliana’s work create an effect, which is at the same time plastic and ideological. “What we see is not explicit. It is interesting to see someone who does not think of photography as just an image” says Dubois. There are two important techniques in Brazilian photography, he continued: one connected to the social and political and other more plastic, where the social is secondary. Juliana’s work balances the two.
Philippe Dubois – Tribuna da Imprensa 18.01.2001 / Rio de Janeiro / Brazil
The skin of the invisible –
The experience of image Juliana
Stein’s photographic series announce and document a crisis that has gripped the modern subject, anchored in a conception of uniform human beings endowed with a fixed identity and complete autonomy. Instead of affirming the integrity of this subject, her work concerns itself with its fragmentary and diffuse character. Rather than point to stable subjectivities, these series privilege the ephemeral and the multiple. Her pictures have no pretension toward discursive, cultured comment, much less any engaged critical or celebratory stance on the fudged state of The limits between the things of the world. In the series entitled Sim e não, Juliana Stein presents portraits of men made-up and cross-dressed in wigs and women’s clothes. Regardless of the reasons that lead these men to assume another sexual orientation, these are photographs that suggest a transitory and circumstantial condition of the individual in contemporaneity – no longer stable, but remaking itself with each passing moment; no longer one, but irreparably many. The affirmative posture of each of these seems to lend some common sense and potency to their desire to be something other than the imposed norm.
Text extract from the catalog of 29ºBienal de São Paulo, September 2010 / São Paulo / Brazil
Early in his remarks about the gloomy picture in the Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes points to the Lacanian notion of tuché, referring to what touches you, or rather the reality that literally tortures you, motif which will later be developed in the duality of punctum / stadium. No doubt the work of Juliana Stein concerns me and, above all, manages to seduce me emotionally. Her eye is endowed by an extraordinary subtlety, but also by an unusual forcefulness. Whether it is her impressive series on prison in which the little details, the tracks and the remnants recover the entirety of the leadership or her approach to madness, which portrays a total creative maturity. Perhaps the complete body of work of Juliana Stein is a new take on the genre of still life, but compelling the subject to a situation metaphorically bumpy when the rave takes over the world and only the poetic may offer some resistance.
Fernando Castro Florez, May 2010 / Extremadura / Spain
The imagery of Juliana Stein
A pose that turns the act in itself, and then backflips.
A 4×6 portrait, blown up and colored in a metaphysic scale.
Emerging from a long corridor of gray-purple maternity a geometric replica of the vaginal route, there they are, the hes and shes :
ECCE OMO (BEHOLD THE MAN)
ECCE PUER (BEHOLD THE CHILD)
ECCE MATER (BEHOLD THE MOTHER)
The mother presents the child who presents back the mother.
An official photo ID of bodies in full perspective.
The picture is not official, despite all standardization: it is social.
Whoever is giving birth presents themselves before a camera which gives birth to the birthgiver, painlessly, over and over.
The flesh becomes a sign, which turns into spirit, which is the very thing we call meaning.
Photon.
The camera gives birth to everyone.
And its midwife is called Juliana Mothers and Fathers.
Or, maybe, Juliana Stern (star) instead of Juliana Stein (stone).
Décio Pignatari, May 2009 / Curitiba / Brazil
Juliana Stein encroaches on marginal places and uses them to reflect. Stein’s approach transcends the visual condition to create a zone of silence that gives photography an evidentiary character: it shows a little visible part of something vast and invisible. Photography is, in her view, the art of inquiring, exploring, in a sort of productive letting go and letting oneself be carried away by characters and situations which, once translated into images, encourage a perception of tone that range from the intriguing serious colourful to the colourless.
Adriana Almada, June 2013, Assunción/Paraguay
Galerie Crone is pleased to present the first German solo exhibition by the Brazilian artist Juliana Stein. The artist has been working in the medium of photography since the 90s. She divides her images into series in which individual works do not just complement each other, they also contrast against each other evoking feelings of fragility, instability and ambivalence.
The exhibition consists of ten photos from the series The Darkest Water, all produced between 2008 and 2014 at the beaches in Ipanema and Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro. Stein’s images not only open up new perspectives in contemporary Brazilian photography they also question our concepts and ideas about Brazilian culture. Instead of affirming the integrity of this subject, these images concern themselves with a more fragmentary and diffuse character, depicting in various ways the disasters and pleasures that take place in ordinary moments.
In the series The Darkest Water we see individuals partly submerged in the water. The line drawn by the water divides the body from what is above and that which is below – a fluctuating line between what is visible and what is hidden, a sliding state of consciousness.
Once we enter the water we became subject to the movements of the waves, which rarely behave the way we predict. Gestures occur as a reaction to this unpredictably, often as spontaneous as the movement of the waves which created them. These gestures are of particular interest to Stein, especially when they create a connection with instability and vulnerability. We cannot see the face of the girl bending her body towards the water, her shoulders hunched, almost as if creating a zone of silence. Another girl jumps back from a wave that has broken on the shoreline. A boy stands with savage playful defiance, and against this unknown order he raises his hand. Despite a calm unpredictability, two young girls position themselves with their bodies bending in a civilized fashion towards the water. Interestingly, Stein captured several of the images whilst standing in the water, exposing herself to the same level of unsteadiness and uncertainty as her subjects.
In order to emphasise these physical gestures, Stein frequently depicts her subjects in this series from behind, so that the viewer is not influenced by facial expressions. However, this system is juxtaposed with the photograph of two young women standing in water that froths around their legs. As one woman looks directly towards the camera as if in mid-conversation, the other, with outstretched arm, appears motionless. The scene suggests helplessness, fear and doubt. This is in no way the tropical paradise one may automatically associate with Brazil. The tropicalism, which has so often marked Brazilian art in the past, is nowhere to be found. Furthermore, the cliché of a wild, erotic beach life, which in connection with fashion and lifestyle photography is so excessively associated with Rio de Janeiro, is completely absent. Whether disrupted by a helicopter, a roaring sea, or an overcrowded beach, Stein’s images do not strive for superficial, idyllic dream worlds, they open a glimpse into sublime abysses which hide beneath the idyllic. To put it in Stein’s own words: “We refuse to live without a tropical paradise.
Text produced by the occasion of Darkest Water show at Crone Galerie