Chronologically stretching from 1965 (the year of the first public appearances of Velvet Underground) to 1994 (the death of Nirvana´s Kurt Cobain), velvetnirvana explores the iconographic universe of three decades, featuring works and documents from the collection of António Neto Alves.
Photographs, books, posters, fanzines, flyers, magazines and other ephemera compose an intricate iconographic universe that defines the vital importance of the word and of the image as producers of meaning and agents of rupture in communication. Divided into four groups (Velvet Underground; Experimental New York; Punk Incandescence and Post?), it highlights a continuous and polymorphic transit between music culture and the visual arts, between institutional experience and the radicality of new modes of production and distribution.
From ephemera to works of art in the most conventional sense of the term (James Welling to Raymond Pettibon), velvetnirvana proposes an indexical cartography that allows us to review, reformulate and create new stories and narratives about what is still evidently defining our culture today.
Words by Tobi Maier, António Neto Alves, Miguel von Hafe Pérez and José Carneiro
