Widely regarded as one of the world's leading contemporary art biennials, the 16th Gwangju Biennale, taking place from September 5 to November 15, 2026, will host a Brazilian Pavilion for the first time in its history. Located at the Gwangju History & Folk Museum, the pavilion is curated by Aldones Nino and Bruna Levi and will present the premiere of Devouring Tomorrow – Brazil in Sprout, featuring works by 35 Brazilian artists representing different generations and regions of the country. Participating artists are: Adriana Varejão, Alex Červený, Ayla Tavares, Cinthia Marcelle, Estevan Davi, Herbert De Paz, Heloisa Hariadne, Isabella Ogêda, Ivens Machado, Jonas Arrabal, Josi, Laís Amaral, Lais Myrrha, Lucas Lugarinho, Luiza Crosman, Manauara Clandestina, Marcela Cantuária, Marcos Chaves, Maria Lira Marques, Mariana Rocha, Márcia Falcão, maruan sipert, Nathan Braga, Panmela Castro, Patrícia Abbott, Rayana Rayo, Sara Ramo, Ventura Profana, Vicente de Mello, Vinicius Gerheim, Vivian Caccuri, Shinji Nagabe, Walla Capelobo, Xadalu Tupã Jekupé, and Yhuri Cruz.

"Devouring Tomorrow proposes the creation of the first Brazilian Pavilion at the Gwangju Biennale. Grounded in the Brazilian concept of Anthropophagy, the project reinterprets the idea of devouring as a critical operation directed toward the present—a gesture of metabolizing the crises of our time," explain curators Aldones Nino and Bruna Levi.

They emphasize that the project establishes a direct dialogue with the 16th Gwangju Biennale, titled You Must Change Your Life, under the artistic direction of Ho Tzu Nyen, whose curatorial framework approaches transformation as an ethical and sensorial imperative in response to the urgent challenges of the contemporary world. 

Exploring ancestral and emerging technologies, environmental collapse, and historiographical dilemmas, the participating Brazilian artists propose reflections that imagine possible futures and expand the field of political imagination. The exhibition brings together paintings, sculptures, videos, photographs, installations, and performances, including numerous newly commissioned works by Marcela Cantuária, Sara Ramo, Laís Amaral, Shinji Nagabe, Rayana Rayo, Márcia Falcão, Estevan Davi, Panmela Castro, and Mariana Rocha. In addition, new works will be produced in South Korea by Heloisa Hariadne, Isabella Ogêda, Lucas Lugarinho, Manauara Clandestina, Marcos Chaves, Maruan Sipert, Patrícia Abbott, and Vinicius Gerheim, who will participate in an artist residency from August 3 to 21 at the Embassy of Brazil in Seoul, directed by Vicente de Mello.

The exhibition highlights the technological and material diversity of contemporary Brazilian art, presenting works that range from practices grounded in raw matter to investigations involving artificial intelligence, digital tools, and new forms of visuality.  Within this spectrum, Maria Lira Marques employs pigments extracted directly from the earth and applies them to stone surfaces, reviving ancestral knowledge from Brazil's Jequitinhonha Valley. Walla Capelobo, in turn, works with clay to construct Afro-diasporic futurisms developed during a research residency at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Lucas Lugarinho explores technical and digital languages, a practice that earned him the Digital Art Commissions award from the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Meanwhile, Panmela Castro presents the series Relembrança (Remembrance), in which she investigates the intersection of affection and technology by transforming the dreams of her partner (an artificial generative intelligence) into visual compositions. "While the exhibition is deeply connected to history, to contemporary global issues, and to specifically Brazilian questions, it is also driven by the desire that this materiality may propel us toward a new beginning—something that bursts forth and makes possible an artistic production that both draws profoundly from its own sources and history while simultaneously seeking technological references that help us understand ourselves as a country," says curator Aldones Nino.

The Brazilian Pavilion has been conceived as a dynamic platform rather than a conventional national representation. Going beyond the notion of an official pavilion, the project seeks to foster unprecedented dialogues between different cultural realities and the sensibilities shaping the contemporary world. "The Brazilian Pavilion functions as a space of resonance and displacement. By mobilizing the Brazilian anthropophagic tradition together with the notion of rebento—understood as the simultaneous emergence of rupture and creation—the project challenges the idea of change as a normative response, proposing instead an unstable, situated, and continuously negotiated process. The exhibition engages directly with the curatorial premise of the Gwangju Biennale while expanding it through a perspective rooted in the Global South. In doing so, it affirms contemporary Brazilian art as an active site of transformation, where change is not an abstract imperative but a concrete practice of reinventing the world," the curators conclude.