Image: Jonathas de Andrade, O Caseiro (The Housekeeper), 2016 © Jonathas de Andrade
The Brandenburgisches Landesmuseum für moderne Kunst (BLMK) will present Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade’s work alongside pieces from its collection in a two-venue exhibition opening in August 2026. Titled ‘Der grelle Schein der Ränder’ (‘The Glaring Light of the Margins’), the project begins at the Neues Schloss in Bad Muskau on 28 August and continues at the BLMK’s Dieselkraftwerk in Cottbus from 30 August to 15 November. The exhibition is a collaboration between the BLMK and the Lausitz Festival.
At the Dieselkraftwerk, the BLMK will bring together de Andrade’s video installations ‘O caseiro / The Housekeeper’ (2016) and ‘Voyeurístico / Voyeuristic’ (2018) with photography, graphic art and painting from its collection. The historical works selected for the presentation date from the 1920s and 1930s, a period described by the museum as one of major political and economic crises and upheavals.
The BLMK frames the pairing through a shared engagement with social realities. Its exhibition material identifies recurring concerns in de Andrade’s practice, including the visibility of social hierarchies in public spaces, economic power structures, the formation of communities and the historical development of socio-political frameworks. The collection works are associated with avant-garde approaches that treated art as an aesthetic expression of socially engaged action and used formal strategies to move between reality and fiction.
The artists represented from the BLMK collection in Cottbus include Walter Ballhause, Pol Cassel, Hans Grundig, Lea Grundig, Carl Lohse, Sepp Mahler, Oskar Nerlinger and Alexander Rodtschenko. The presentation is curated by Kobi Ben-Meir and Ulrike Kremeier. It is supported by Galleria Continua, according to the BLMK, which is responsible for the Cottbus exhibition.
De Andrade, born in 1982, lives and works in Recife, Brazil. He works across video, photography, sculpture and installation and has exhibited extensively in South America, North America and Western Europe. The BLMK describes the artist as one of the outstanding voices in international contemporary art and notes that his work has so far been shown only rarely in Germany.
A related presentation at the Neues Schloss in Bad Muskau will run from 28 August through 31 October. Curated by Kobi Ben-Meir, it places de Andrade’s video installations and sculptural works opposite photographs made by Helga Paris in the 1970s from the BLMK collection. The Cottbus exhibition opens on Sunday, 30 August, from 11am to 1pm, with free admission; the Dieselkraftwerk is located at Uferstraße/Am Amtsteich 15 and is open Tuesday to Sunday from 11am to 7pm.
