As a result of winning the Brazilian photography award Bolsa Zum 2018, held by Instituto Moreira Salles, Sofia Borges developed THEATRE FOR ARTIFICE, the second piece in her series of Performances to Become a Photograph .

Proposed as a vigorous happening that lasted a total of six hours inside the museum, Borges collaborated with eight dancers, two painters, hundreds of masks, and four large-scale backdrops to create life-sized, live assemblages. Open to the public with limited entry, Borges directed each scene’s composition while performers and painters continuously transformed their bodies and the masks, using abundant pigment, ink, and adornments.

The idea was to compose a dance between hundreds of masks and artifacts, all photographed by the artist during a decade of research inside museums, prehistoric sites, natural history and archeology research centers. These artifacts, drawn from numerous periods, origins, cultures, and contexts, were printed on a large scale and cut to become masks, their size purposefully exaggerated beyond human scale to signify meanings that surpass their museological roles.

Despite their diversity, all these artifacts shared a common quality: the “museological trap.” . They no longer belong to the ongoing transformations of culture, but Borges believes that their meanings does.

Although trapped inside displays or shelves, with their relevance reduced and categorized by their museological role at that specific historical moment, at that specific museum or context, Borges believes that their meanings evolve—they expand, contract, disappear, and revive back.

Theatre For Artifice is a dance about embodying these movements from the perspective of the object itself. Bringing them out of their museological inanimate-passive state.