Forget the skyline: Aruane Garzedin opens at Centro Cultural Correios with works that read the city’s ground as memory, conflict, and presence.
Centro Cultural Correios Rio de Janeiro opens on January 28, 2026 the solo exhibition “How long has it been since I looked at the sky?” by Bahian artist Aruane Garzedin. Curated by Shannon Botelho, the show brings together around 20 works, including acrylic paintings on canvas, works on paper, an installation, and a large-scale textile piece.
The exhibition highlights a key slice of Garzedin’s research into the relationship between body, space, and time in contemporary urban life. Instead of gazing upward, her attention shifts to the city’s ground—treated as a surface where everyday life leaves marks, erasures, and traces that endure.
When the city becomes a surface
Trained in Architecture and Urbanism, Garzedin has moved through the visual arts for decades, building a practice rooted in close observation of the city’s rhythms. Over time, her painting expanded beyond the canvas into graffiti and installation, reflecting processes of appropriation, wear, and re-inscription in public space.
In this solo show, sidewalks, shadows, forgotten objects, barriers, signage, and urban markings appear as evidence of human presence. Layered paint and a disciplined palette shape images that play with presence and absence while keeping the city’s textures front and center.
“The ground is material and friction, but as public space it is also a social territory that reflects broader issues such as the right to the city, conflicts, and negotiations,” says Aruane Garzedin.
Installation and textile highlights
Among the featured works is the installation Sem gravidade (180 × 340 cm), printed on voile. It treats the ground as presence and, through permeability and suspension, pushes ideas of weight, support, and disconnection in spatial experience—especially under the influence of new technologies and social media.
Another key piece is O solo em comum (180 × 130 cm), using a rug as its support to create a direct relationship between body and artwork. It frames the ground as a site of dialogue, crossed by multiple presences and narratives that, in some contexts, can become corrosive.
Portuguese stone pavement, without romance
Curator Shannon Botelho describes the ground in Garzedin’s work as “origin and destination,” a territory where visions of the world—and their failures—are inscribed. For him, by directing attention downward, the artist makes visible what is usually missed in the rush, revealing the city as a contested field of memory, use, and erasure.
Rio’s iconic Portuguese stone pavements structure several compositions, forming patterns that run across the painted surface and expand the scenes’ sense of space. In Botelho’s view, these designs do not lead to abstraction; instead, they open the image to a coexistence of geometry, ordinary objects, and shadow-play, rejecting any idealized portrait of the city.
Between Salvador and downtown Rio
Living between Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, Garzedin brings firsthand experience of different urban dynamics into her practice. Presenting the exhibition at Centro Cultural Correios—right in downtown Rio—strengthens the dialogue with the territory that fuels her research.
With open, time-worn images, the works encourage a slower kind of looking. The show invites visitors to reflect on how they move through the city—and what emerges when attention stays close to the ground.
About the artist
Aruane Garzedin (born 1959, Salvador, Bahia; lives and works between Salvador and Rio de Janeiro) is a visual artist with solo and group exhibitions in Brazil and abroad. She holds a degree in Architecture, a master’s in Architecture and Urbanism, and a PhD in Fine Arts. The city functions as her laboratory for observing the body/space/time relationship, the thematic axis of her visual poetics. From 2016 onward, her painting expanded to walls and interventions in the landscape. A Salvador native, she is also a writer and seeks to merge these languages in her artistic practice.
Visitor information
Exhibition: How long has it been since I looked at the sky?
Artist: Aruane Garzedin
Curatorship: Shannon Botelho
Opening: January 28, 2026, 4 pm to 8 pm
On view: through March 14, 2026
Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 12 pm to 7 pm
Venue: Centro Cultural Correios Rio de Janeiro
Address: Rua Visconde de Itaboraí, 20 – Centro, Rio de Janeiro – RJ
Admission: Free
Foto: Divulgação
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