Resisting the Dominant Gaze: Prison Works by Brazilian Artist Rosangela Renno and Filmmaker Maria Augusta Ramos

This article examines photographic installations by Rosangela Renno and documentaries by Maria Augusta Ramos as contemporary representations of resistance to visual renderings of the colonialist and neocolonialist encounter. Works such as Renno's series Vulgo (1998-1999) and Ramos's film Juizo (2007) express resistance through the deliberate absence of a frontal, reciprocated gaze. These artists' aesthetic decisions serve to challenge fixed notions of identity and typecasting around binary opposites of dominant-powerful and marginal-powerless. They become transgressive alternatives to Brazilian identity in the country's vast history of representation. In the words of John Berger, Renno and Ramos incorporate contemporary visual alternatives "into social and political memory." Within the visual politics articulated by bell hooks, these two artists subvert "institutionalized systems of domination" by way of aesthetic interventions. In examining these artists' works in this framework, this article explores the value of aesthetic interventions in the context of postdictatorship Brazil.