Flávia Junqueira

BRAZILIAN, B. 1985

Flávia Junqueira, born in São Paulo in 1985, is among the most ambitious photographers working in Brazil today. She holds a degree in Visual Arts from Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado and a master's degree in Visual Poetics from the University of São Paulo, and her work has entered the permanent collections of the country's principal museums of modern and contemporary art.

Junqueira's practice unites photography, installation and performance in a single undertaking of extraordinary scale. She gains access to buildings that are rarely given over to an artist at all, opera houses, palaces, national museums and civic halls, and transforms their interiors outright, filling them with color and with childlike objects, most often many thousands of balloons. The photograph is the final work, but it is the residue of something closer to a theatrical production, mounted once and dismantled the same day. Few photographers anywhere attempt work at this scale, and fewer still are granted the rooms in which to do it.

What the images hold is a genuine and unresolved tension. Architecture built to project permanence and authority is set against material that is weightless, cheap and about to fail, and the collision raises the questions that give the work its weight: who these rooms were built for, who has historically been admitted to them, and what is lost when they fall silent. The photographs are celebratory and elegiac in the same instant, arrested at the moment just before the air leaves the room. That doubleness, exuberance shadowed by loss, is what distinguishes her from the tradition of staged photography she works within.

In 2022 Junqueira became the first artist to stage an intervention of this kind in a European theater, transforming Barcelona's Gran Teatre del Liceu, one of the most significant opera houses in Europe, with approximately 1,500 balloons. The project marked her arrival on the international stage and confirmed the reach of a practice that had already been widely recognized in Brazil.

Her work is held in the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, MAR · Museu de Arte do Rio, MIS São Paulo, MAB-FAAP, the Museu do Itamaraty, Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz and The World Bank. She lives and works in São Paulo.

EDUCATION
MA, Visual Poetics, University of São Paulo
BA, Visual Arts, Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado, São Paulo
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
The Absurd and the Grace, Sun Valley, Idaho
Extasia, Centro Cultural FIESP, São Paulo
Rêverie, São Paulo
Gran Teatre del Liceu intervention, Barcelona, 2022
SELECTED PUBLIC AND INSTITUTIONAL COLLECTIONS
Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo
MAR · Museu de Arte do Rio
MIS São Paulo
MAB-FAAP, São Paulo
Museu do Itamaraty
Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz
The World Bank