Hugo Brazão

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Hugo Brazão

Cat did it!

(2021)

Cat did it! takes as its starting point the story of Koko, the gorilla who, after reportedly tearing a sink from the wall, used sign language to indicate ‘cat did it’, apparently shifting the blame onto one of her pets. Whether or not the gesture constituted deliberate deception, the anecdote opens onto questions of guilt, responsibility and the impulse to distance ourselves from the consequences of our actions.

Moving between animal behaviour, scapegoating and rituals of ablution, the exhibition considers the act of cleansing as both physical and psychological: from washing the body to ‘washing one’s hands’ of responsibility. Deception and purification emerge as parallel strategies of self-preservation — ways of negotiating discomfort, guilt and the desire to emerge clean from the mess we make.

Location

Seoul

Dates

2023

Materials

ngie


Photo Credits


Reinis Lismanis

Snake in a Cookie Jar considers colour as a strategy of concealment: a surface that attracts attention while simultaneously obscuring what it contains. Taking its title from the imagined discovery of a snake inside a cookie jar, the exhibition uses this deliberately absurd encounter to examine seduction as a form of misdirection, and the unstable boundary between attraction and threat.

Drawing on ‘snake detection theory’ — the hypothesis that aspects of human vision evolved in response to the presence of snakes — the exhibition connects colour and perception to more primal mechanisms of attention, fear and survival. Across painting, textile and sculpture, colour operates less as decoration than as a lure: intensifying visibility while complicating what, exactly, is being seen.

Snake in a Cookie Jar considers colour as a strategy of concealment: a surface that attracts attention while simultaneously obscuring what it contains. Taking its title from the imagined discovery of a snake inside a cookie jar, the exhibition uses this deliberately absurd encounter to examine seduction as a form of misdirection, and the unstable boundary between attraction and threat.

Drawing on ‘snake detection theory’ — the hypothesis that aspects of human vision evolved in response to the presence of snakes — the exhibition connects colour and perception to more primal mechanisms of attention, fear and survival. Across painting, textile and sculpture, colour operates less as decoration than as a lure: intensifying visibility while complicating what, exactly, is being seen.