Anna Bella Geiger — Limiar [Threshold]
Solo exhibition presented at the Museu Judaico de São Paulo, jun.-sept. 2025
Curated with Priscyla Gomes
The notion of threshold is present in several areas of knowledge, evoking the idea of transition, passage. Such crossings, transpositions and hybridizations — whether physical or metaphorical — are central to Anna Bella Geiger’s work.
Geiger (née Waldman) is recognized as one of the most important and prolific artists in Brazilian art. Born to Polish-Jewish immigrants, she brings deterritorialization and questions about places of action as a constitutive part of her personal geography: an experience that opens up a fertile field for reflection on the diaspora, the encounter with otherness, and the ways of thinking about language itself.
For the artist, mapping and transposing means transforming Geography into a place of art. Geiger makes it possible, through an imaginary tracing of meridians and parallels, to reflect on the regional, the local and the global, the present and the past, the interior and the exterior, the self and the other. Many of her works deal directly with the complex notion of space, sometimes subverting cartographic conventions, sometimes challenging the imaginaries that hierarchically organize territory and society.
Anna Bella Geiger — Limiar r [Threshold] presents around sixty works and documentary photographs related to the artist’s teaching practice, which unfold across five major conceptual axes: spaces, creation-proposition, language, deterritorialization-transposition, and political imagination. Geiger’s trajectory, which began in the 1950s and remains intensely fertile, is explored transversally across these axes, highlighting thematic recurrences, the use of multiple languages, the exploration of shared spaces for experimentation, and the constant questioning of the status of the artwork and its political role. This exhibition seeks to explore such passages and thresholds in the artist’s vast production, through emblematic works from different periods — from 1962 to 2025.
The exhibition opens with the series Situações-limites [Limit-situations] in which, over black-and-white photographic fragments, the artist replicates the handwritten phrase “Imagination is an act of freedom.” Created in 1974, at the height of the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship, these works echo the repression and authoritarianism of the time while announcement at a new future. Their relevance is reaffirmed today by calling on us to imagine common futures on this Earth.
By exploring a wide range of languages in her work, Geiger proposes games of inventioncreativity, inviting the viewer to reflect on the world around them and on our capacity to imagine new realities. The artist’s first solo exhibition held at a Jewish Museum, these thresholds also suggest powerful connections with Jewish history and culture, including notions of polysemy and cultural transit.
The exhibition Anna Bella Geiger — Limiar invites us, ultimately, to an urgent and challenging exercise of political imagination in times of crisis. A threshold that, the artist suggests, can only be crossed in constant movement.
photos: Filipe Berndt