THE TRIENNIAL 2025
Laura Lima
Indistinct Form (Forma Indistinta), 2025
Mixed media
Laura Lima expands traditional ideas of contemporary art. Her work often unfolds over time and is created collaboratively with professionals across disciplines. She uses unexpected materials—from food and clothing to brushes and human hair—to challenge how we experience art.
In Indistinct Form (Forma Indistinta), Lima takes her practice a step further by creating artworks not for humans but for animals that become both audience and participants. She worked closely with wildlife experts at Instituto Vida Livre in Rio de Janeiro and the Mass Audubon Boston Nature Center to learn how birds and woodland creatures inhabit and move through Boston’s urban wilds.
After carefully selecting sites throughout the wildlife sanctuary, Lima designed sculptural elements that her team in Brazil along with local ceramists and woodworkers have brought to life in this installation. With this artwork, she places animals at the center of the story—not as background elements, but as visible, central figures in a shared environment. This project invites us to ask: Why has art been made only for humans? What happens when we create art for other living beings?
Visible Daily
Dawn till Dusk
Boston Nature Center, Mass Audubon
Mattapan, MA 02126
SELF-GUIDED TRAIL MAP
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Laura Lima
b. 1971, based in Rio de Janeiro
Born in 1971, Laura Lima grew up in Brazil’s countryside region of Governador Valadares. While still very young, Lima moved to Rio de Janeiro, where she is currently based. The artist received a BA in Philosophy from the State University of Rio de Janeiro in the 1990s and also studied art at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro. Since mid 1990s, Laura Lima has put forth a body of work which escapes an easy classification, they are “not performance, not installation, not cinema…” but are attempts to visually articulate, in concrete reality, a personal glossary of concepts that the artist has worked and reworked during the course of her over 30 year career. Emblematic of this rigorous conceptual engagement is her best known group of works Man=flesh/Woman=flesh (Homem=carne/Mulher=carne), in which humans and animals are used as matter of a complex landscape definition, which executes a precise set of instructions.
Laura Lima was the 2014 recipient of BACA, Bonnefanten Award for Contemporary Arts, the Netherlands; and in 2006, Lima was awarded the Marcantonio Vilaça Prize. The artist was also nominated for the Francophone Prize in 2011, and Hans Nefkens Prize 2012.
Solo exhibitions of Lima’s work have been presented in venues around the world such as Pinacoteca, São Paulo, Brazil; Fondazione Prada in Milan, Italy; Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Argentina; MUAC, Mexico City, Mexico; Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland; Casa França Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Fundação Eva Klabin, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden; Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, The Netherlands; SMK-National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark.; MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain.
Lima’s work has been included in prestigious group exhibitions such as Witch Hunt at the Hammer Museum (2021); 24th and 27th São Paulo Biennales; the 2nd and 3rd Mercosul Biennales in Porto Alegre, Brazil; XI Lyon Biennale in 2011; and 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 Rooms in various cities since 2011. In 2014, VERTRIPTICAL, the third film in the Cinema Shadow project, showed live at the Stockholm Film Festival, Sweden. The project was commissioned by Bonniers Konsthall and filmed both in Rio de Janeiro and Stockholm for an 8-hour period during which it was simultaneously filmed and screened in real time.
Laura Lima’s works are included in the collections of Instituto Inhotim, Modern Art Museum of São Paulo, Bonniers Konsthall, Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Zabludowicz Collection, Bonnefantenmuseum, among others.
Laura Lima lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. She is also co-founder and adviser of A Gentil Carioca, along with Ernesto Neto and Marcio Botner, an artist-run gallery in Rio de Janeiro.
