In 1865, the French photographer Augusto Stahl made images of a naked Black woman in Rio de Janeiro. They show the unidentified woman – Stahl didn’t bother to record her name – facing the camera, in profile, and from behind, in a sequence that inevitably recalls police mugshots.
Stahl was working for the Swiss-American biologist Louis Agassiz, a professor of natural history at Harvard University, who had commissioned photos of “pure” Black people to support his racist theories, such as the idea that miscegenation would lead to inferior human beings.
“The images affected me deeply, but I didn’t know what to do with them,” said the Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino, 57, who recalls first encountering them while reading a book in 2011. “I took a photo of the page and put it in a drawer.”
About a year and a half later, she transformed it into a work of art, Assentamento, named after the altars of Afro-Brasilian religions. The photographs, printed life-size on fabric, are adorned with embroidery of a heart, a foetus and roots. Each one is then cut into four parts and “sutured” together – with some misalignment, to represent the psychic and physical scars borne by generations of black Brazilians. Each picture is flanked by two mounds of paper clay arms piled up like firewood to symbolize the way Black bodies were consumed as fuel for Brazil’s economic growth.
This year, Assentamento was one of the main attractions of the first solo exhibition by a Black female artist held at the Buenos Aires Museum of Latin American Art (Malba), which was visited by 72,000 people between March and June.
“What struck me was the strength of that woman,” said Paulino. “If these photographs were taken to showcase a false inferiority of those people, I want to demonstrate that, despite being kidnapped and thrown into the hold of a ship, those individuals survived and still managed to build a nation.”
In recent years, Paulino – one of Brazil’s most prominent visual artists – has exhibited her work in museums across Germany, the US and Italy. In November, she will unveil a 9-metre-tall mural at New York’s High Line, and Tate Modern has confirmed that it is acquiring one of her pieces.
On Thursday, Paulino will receive the inaugural award for artistic freedom granted by the Munch Museum in Oslo. Announcing its decision, the jury stated: “Rosana Paulino has contributed to some of the most important conversations about art, history, and society in Brazil and beyond,” adding that the artist “has been a leading voice in black feminism, with a steadfast commitment to the struggle of afro-Brazilian communities and the ongoing fight against racism”.
The techniques she has used throughout her 30-year career include embroidery, collage, painting and sculpture. But the central theme is often the same: “I want to bring to the table the issue of what it means to be a Black woman in a racist country like Brazil,” she said.
This is precisely what makes Paulino’s work “universal”, according to Andrea Giunta, co-curator (along with Igor Simões) of her exhibition at Malba.
“Slavery was not just a problem for Brazil, but for the Americas,” said Giunta, an arts professor at the University of Buenos Aires. “Europe is also deeply involved in Paulino’s reflections, which are universal in a geographical sense and in terms of social justice.”
For Paulino, the pain caused by the diaspora of Africans “is present in Latin America, in the US and here in Europe with immigrants”, she said from a hotel in Oslo, waiting for the award ceremony. “And this is making my work reach audiences I never expected.”
Born and raised in a working-class neighbourhood in São Paulo, Paulino first discovered “Black art” in her teenage years at a samba school parade during Carnival. “The theme of that Mocidade Alegre’s parade was about Brazilian artists, the few that were acknowledged at the time,” she said.
With a talent for drawing she’d had since childhood, she decided to pursue a degree in art at university.
In 2011, Paulino became the first black Brazilian woman to obtain a PhD in visual arts. “To have an academic validation was a strategy I devised so that my voice could be heard … Brazilian art has always been very white and elitist, which, with few exceptions, has made the work of Black artists invisible,” she said.
In recent years, representation has improved, but she emphasises that no one opened doors out of “kindness”: “Brazilian institutions were forced to act because they were experiencing international embarrassment, with an entirely white and Eurocentric market that ignored its own country,” she said.
For the Brazilian curator Janaína Damaceno, “one of the great qualities of Paulino’s work is that she’s an incredible researcher”.
The artist intends to use most of the cash prize from the Munch Award – (£20,000) – to establish the Rosana Paulino Institute, which will be built in a working-class neighbourhood of São Paulo. The institute will serve as an image library and study centre documenting representations of Black people.
This year, Paulino will stop teaching as an art professor and dedicate herself entirely to her art. “I want to spend time in my studio, producing, researching and experimenting with new materials or new ways of using materials.
“I want to be able not to have to be political all the time, not to devise so many strategies all the time … We don’t see this same kind of pressure on white artists,” she said.