Image: Nam June Paik, TV Cello, 2002. Nam June Paik Art Center Collection. © Nam June Paik Estate
The Pinacoteca de São Paulo is presenting an exhibition that places Nam June Paik (1932–2006), the South Korean artist widely regarded as the father of video art, in conversation with two artists for whom sound and performance are central: the American cellist and performance artist Charlotte Moorman (1933–1991) and the Brazilian artist Vivian Caccuri (born 1986). Titled “Hyundai Translocal Series: Via Satélite – Diálogos com Nam June Paik – Charlotte Moorman e Vivian Caccuri”, the show runs from 17 October 2026 to 14 March 2027 in the museum’s Pina Contemporânea building.
The exhibition is co-organised with the Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin, South Korea, and forms part of the Hyundai Translocal Series, a programme launched in 2025 to foster dialogue between South Korean art institutions and their counterparts abroad. It brings together sculptures, videos, installations, photographs and documents.
Among the works shown in the Galeria Praça is TV Cello, a video sculpture Paik conceived in 1971 for Moorman to play. Three television sets of different sizes are combined with strings, a scroll, tuning pegs, cables and electronic circuitry, all enclosed in a transparent acrylic covering that the museum likens to a skin. The piece belongs to a long run of collaborations between the two artists, which also includes TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969).
Caccuri contributes a new commission, Medusa e Clepsidra (2026), a sound installation that renders the flow of blood as matter and sound. According to the museum, this bodily process normally remains inaudible, except, in Buddhist thought, during elevated states of meditation.
Paik studied art history and music in Tokyo before moving to Germany, where he met John Cage and joined the Fluxus movement. He settled in New York in 1964, the year his partnership with Moorman began, and later built the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer with the engineer Shuya Abe. He also staged pioneering satellite broadcasts, including Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984), and first visited Brazil for the 13th São Paulo Biennial in 1975.
Moorman, founder of the Annual New York Avant-Garde Festival, left orchestral playing for experimental music and performance, working with figures such as John Cage, Yoko Ono and Joseph Beuys. Caccuri, who lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, examines how the boundary between music and noise is drawn. She is known for her Soundsystems series and took part in the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019.
This is the first of two exhibitions the Pinacoteca is devoting to the project. The second, which pairs Paik with biarritzzz, Christine Sun Kim, Jane Jin Kaisen and Caccuri, is scheduled to open in the Grande Galeria on 28 November 2026 and to run until 28 March 2027.
