Spotlight
Brazilian photographer Júlia Pontés receives The Current's 2022 Artist-in-Residence Award + Visura's 1st 2022 Grant for Visual Journalists
visura blog
Aug 11, 2022
Visura in partnership with The Current, a center for contemporary art, is delighted to announce Brazilian-Argentinian investigative artist, photographer, researcher, and activist Júlia Pontés as the recipient of the 2022 The Current's Artist-in-Residence Award & Visura's 1st 2022 Grant for Visual Journalists. This recognition is for her longtime work on extractivism and mining explorations in Brazil.
The award is an invite-only opportunity selected by The Current’s Executive Director Rachel Moore and Visura founder Adriana Teresa Letorney to participate in a 2-week residency in Stowe, Vermont. Pontés will have a designated wing of The Current’s gallery space to continue working on a mining visual survey focused on extractivism and mining explorations in her home state of Minas Gerais in Brazil.
Pontés will also receive the 2022 Visura Grant for Visual Journalists, an opportunity for up to 5 individuals who identify as visual artists, journalists and/or storytellers working on self-funded long term projects to receive a $2000 grant cash prize to continue their work. The theme for this year’s grant is focused on climate change, environmental justice, gender equality, racial justice, and human rights.
Executive Director of The Current Rachel Moore said in a written statement, "Júlia Pontés is one of the most impressive emerging artists of our time doing extraordinarily important work. Her practice is steeped in the research of mining, the political implications, and the resulting social and environmental devastation in Brazil. With a deep commitment to this field of study, she is not only presenting gorgeously haunting work, but transcending it to change through her practice of activism. She is truly an incredible and inspiring artist to pay attention to, and we are thrilled to support her in this residency and exhibition in partnership with Visura.”
For the fall of 2022, The Current and Visura partnered in an effort to enhance the human experience through the visual arts. Together, the art center and visual media tech startup will award an annual residency, announce the recipients of this year’s 2022 Visura Grant for Visual Journalists, and collaborate in a group exhibition. The partnership was in part made possible with the support of an anonymous donor, who in 2022 made a generous contribution to The Current.
Júlia Pontés
Born in Brazil and based in New York—Júlia Pontés is a Brazilian-Argentinian investigative artist, photographer, researcher, and activist. Pontés' work focuses mainly on extractivism and mining explorations in Brazil. It entails a deep community engagement, where she develops strong ties, academic and investigative research, and documentary practices. She is currently a member of a group of Brazilian researchers studying mining impacts in her home country. Julia uses performance, video, photography, and other media such as installation and sculpture in her practice. Pontés explores digital and analog media, especially challenging and often pushing the medium's physical limitations; some of her aerial images are produced with an adapted large format film camera.
Her mining visual survey, done mostly in her home state of Minas Gerais with the collaboration of a pilot, has been recognized by Harvard University's Planetary Health Alliance, Visura, and NYFA, where she has been a mentee twice. It has been published by Bloomberg Businessweek, Geo Magazine, Musée Magazine, and Zone Zero and, in Brazil, by Globo's G1 portal, Plurale, O Tempo, Estado de Minas, Folha, and Midia Ninja. In 2020 she was awarded a National Geographic Emergency Fund to document the effects of the pandemic in mining communities.
Júlia holds a specialization in Law and Economics from the Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Argentina; her research focuses on the economic analysis of Brazilian mineral regulation. She started learning photography at Escuela Argentina de Fotografia and graduated in photography at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in 2015. In 2022 Julia received her MFA in Visual Arts | Photography from Columbia University.
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Visura
Visura is a global platform for visual storytellers. The membership platform is a destination for publishers to license visual content directly from freelancers, and a home for visual storytellers to access business tools to showcase and sell editorial, creative and commercial images directly to publishers, businesses and visual content buyers.
The Current
The Current is a non-profit center for contemporary arts in Stowe, Vermont. We have progressive programming that balances challenging critical and thematic exhibitions with community events. We are free to the public, offer a wide range of public programs associated with our exhibitions, and have a robust education department.
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