Raphael Fonseca

Raphael Fonseca works as a curator of modern and contemporary Latin American art at the Denver Art Museum. He is the chief curator of the 14th Mercosur Biennial, to happen next March 2025 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He curated the 22nd SESC_Videobrasil Biennale, along with Renée Akitelek Mboya and Solange Farkas in 2023. He worked as a curator at MAC Niterói (Contemporary Art Museum of Niterói, Brazil) from 2017 to 2020. He holds a PhD in Critic and Art History (State University of Rio de Janeiro). The juxtaposition of different temporalities and how this can trigger contemporary reflections for audiences is crucial in his practice. Humor, absurdity, pop culture, and the notion that an exhibition relates to the ideas of assembly, set design, and spectacle have grown among his research interests. He works with artists from everywhere but with a more significant focus on the ones born and/or based in the so-called Global South. Recently he curated Fullgás: visual arts and the 1980s in Brazil (Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2024); The awake volcanoes: Sandra Vásquez de La Horra (Denver Art Museum, 2024), Who tells a tale, adds a tail (Denver Art Museum, 2022); Raio-que-o-parta: fictions of modern in Brazil (SESC 24 de Maio, São Paulo, 2022), Sweat (Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, 2021) and To-and-fro (Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil, 2019).