LUXEMBOURG.- Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean stages the first major institutional exhibition dedicated to Brazilian artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz.

For over a decade, Ana Vaz (b. 1986, Brasília) has developed a practice that cuts across disciplinary boundaries, placing cinema and visual arts in dialogue with fields such as anthropology, ecology, philosophy and critical pedagogy. Her films and installations engage with urgent questions of our time, from the enduring legacies of colonial modernity to environmental devastation, tracing their entanglement and their lasting effects on territories and their communities, whether human, animal, vegetal or spectral. In each of her works, she pays particular attention to the scars, ghosts and silenced stories that inhabit these territories, as well as the forms of resistance and resilience that arise from them.

Across more than twenty films and installations, Ana Vaz has forged a distinctive cinematic language that combines formal experimentation with a sustained engagement with history, politics and systems of representation, often shaped by her own biography. Born and raised in Brasília, she frequently returns to Brazil’s modernist capital to probe the contradictions, exclusions and blind spots embedded in modernity. Her subsequent trajectory across multiple geographies, from Brazil to Australia and Europe, has nurtured an approach deeply attuned to processes of displacement, circulation and cultural entanglement.

In dialogue with the histories of experimental film and the subversive spirit of Third Cinema – a radical film movement that emerged in Latin America during the late 1960s and 1970s as a critique of commercialism and imperialism –, Ana Vaz questions Western regimes of representation and inherited structures of the cinematic gaze: film as a window onto the world and the camera as an instrument of observation, capture and mastery. Instead, she proposes a more reciprocal form of attention in which filmmaking becomes a practice of encounter and relation. She advocates for an 'embodied cinema' in which the body and affects take precedence, fostering a heightened engagement with the worlds we inhabit.

A câmera é o corpo (The Camera Is The Body) unfolds within a cinematic environment that connects the different exhibition spaces through a meticulous montage of images, sounds and voices. Bringing together films, installations, archives and photographic works, including several new productions, the exhibition is organised around a central space conceived as an 'agora'. It reflects the artist’s ambition to highlight film’s social and political potential beyond the screen, thus expanding conventional understandings of what cinema can be.

AMERIKA

A first gallery features Vaz’s three-channel film installation É Noite na América (It is Night in America, 2022). Filmed at the Brasília Zoo, home to hundreds of rescued animals, the work explores the contamination of the natural world by urban expansion. Shot on expired 16mm film stock and employing the day-for-night technique, which immerses the film in an endless twilight, it reflects on the displacement and extinction of animal species by weaving together a multiplicity of perspectives.

Alongside this installation, several works extend Vaz’s investigations into the layered histories of the territories that today constitute Brazil, with the legacies of colonialism woven throughout.

Apiyemiyekî? (2019) draws on an archive of drawings produced by members of the Waimiri-Atroari people in the mid-1980s, during critical literacy workshops inspired by Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy. These images preserve a collective visual memory while bearing witness to the violence inflicted on the community during Brazil’s military dictatorship. The 16mm film Pax Tellurica (2025) results from a cameraless process in which Vaz buried unexposed film stock in an Amazonian archaeological site containing terra preta, an ancient anthropogenic fertile soil. The resulting work gives rise to what Vaz once described as a "cinema of shadows", in which the earth itself becomes both the author and the subject of the image.

EUROPA

EUROPA centres on Vaz’s recent film series Meteoro (2023–26), the later chapter of which, Meteoro: O coiote (The Coyote) (2026), was created for the exhibition. Comprising four chapters and presented as dual projections shown sequentially across two double screens, the films portray the cities of Paris, Porto and Rome as seen in their spectral dimension, haunted by what appears absent yet manifests itself everywhere: their colonial pasts as much as the outlines of future disasters.

The camera turns its attention to objects, sites, infrastructures and landscapes of transit and extraction such as railways, rivers, bridges, ports and mines, which become the films’ main protagonists. The images become the ground for multiple voices: narratives, testimonies, fables and poems entrusted by Vaz to writers and collaborators with whom she has long been in dialogue. Each voice addresses the cities from a position of displacement and points toward an 'elsewhere', whether temporal or geographical. Historical excavations and anticipatory visions intertwine.

This spectral atmosphere extends through the series of hand-manipulated Polaroids developed by Vaz alongside the films. These images, like the films themselves, affirm an embodied perspective, one further intensified by the traces left through the manipulation of the photographs during the development process. Here too, the image becomes a body.

ÁGORA

At the heart of the exhibition, Vaz invites visitors to read, rest, listen and engage in myriad forms of conviviality. Throughout the exhibition’s duration, this space hosts a programme of activities developed by Vaz in dialogue with Mudam’s Publics Department, featuring performances, workshops, readings, listening sessions and conversations led by many of her longstanding collaborators. Local organisations working on issues such as migration, diversity, accessibility and gender are invited to inhabit and activate this space, hosting activities of their choosing. These contributions, in turn, inform the content of an evolving publication (Marginalia, 2026–) created in collaboration with artist and publisher Nuno da Luz, developed on site and displayed on the walls of the agora.

Two collaborative films are also presented in this space: A Film, Reclaimed (2015), an essay film co-created with Tristan Bera that revisits moving images produced during the twentieth century to draw a parallel between the history of cinema and the rise of the Anthropocene, and 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (2020), a 'film-poem' that emerged from a year-long process of collective inquiry between high school students and Vaz exploring 'what cinema might become when it listens, pauses and unlearns'.

Exhibition design: a.ferrari.arquitetura (Anna Ferrari, Beatriz Teixeira, Marina Vezzani and Julia Terron) in collaboration with Fernanda Brenner.

Curators: Christophe Gallois, assisted by Léa Kelsen and Adèle Wester.

Ana Vaz (1986, Brasília) has held solo exhibitions internationally, including at Secession, Vienna (2025); Solar, Vila do Conde; Batalha, Porto (2024); Pivô, São Paulo (2022); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2021); Matadero, Madrid (2019) and LUX, London (2018). Her work has been included in the 11th Contour Biennale, Mechelen (2026); 18th Istanbul Biennial (2025); Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (2023) and Biennale Gherdëina (2022). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions at institutions such as Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris (2023); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2022) and Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice (2022 – commissioned by Fondazione In Between Art Film). Her films have been shown in festivals such as the Locarno Film Festival (2026, 2022); MoMA Doc Fortnight, New York; CPH:Dox, Copenhagen (2023); Berlinale, Berlin (2023, 2021, 2020); International Film Festival Rotterdam (2023, 2020) and Viennale, Vienna (2022). Individual screenings and special focus on her work include events at Bozar, Brussels (2026); ICA, London (2025); Harvard Film Archive (2024); High Line Art, New York (2023); Cinema Urbana, Brasilia; Courtisane, Ghent; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2022) and Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo (2020). Her work is represented in the collections of Kadist, Paris; Cnap, Paris; Pinacoteca, São Paulo and Frac Bretagne.

Ana Vaz lives and works in Paris.

Publication: Ana Vaz — The Camera Is The Body

Since the end of the 2000s, Ana Vaz (1986, Brasília, Brazil) has set out to unlearn the camera’s oldest habit: the vertical gaze that parses and captures. Her films start at the ground, alongside the submerged perspectives that extraction was built to ignore. Rooted in the unruly tradition of Brazilian cinema and nourished by critical theory, radical pedagogy and knowledge systems that sidestep the Western canon, her work invites us to see otherwise, to notice that every act of looking is also an act of exposure.

Published to coincide with her first solo exhibition A câmera é o corpo (The Camera is the Body) at Mudam Luxembourg, this monograph brings together commissioned essays by Erika Balsom, Fernanda Brenner, Juliana Fausto and Tristan Bera; conversations with Olivier Marboeuf, Suely Rolnik and Dilton de Almeida as well as Vaz’s own writing. This collection examines a body of work that extends beyond the screen, engaging with questions of decolonial criticism, political ecology and micropolitical resistance.

Editor: Fernanda Brenner

Managing Editor: Marie-Alix Isdahl

Contributors: Ana Vaz, Bettina Steinbrügge, Dilton de Almeida, Erika Balsom, Fernanda Brenner, Juliana Fausto, Olivier Marboeuf, Suely Rolnik, Tristan Bera

Designer: Montasser Drissi

Publishers: Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, JRP|Editions

Language: English
Number of pages: 232
ISBN: 978-3-03764-665-6