The Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo (MAM São Paulo) receives an unprecedented work by artist Shirley Paes Leme, specially designed to occupy the institution's Glass Room. At the invitation of MAM's chief curator, Cauê Alves, the artist conceived a site-specific installation that dialogues with the museum's surroundings, and at the same time instigates the public to think about climatic conditions. 

Our World (2022-2023) is an installation consisting of over 1000 used car air conditioning filters and reflective aluminum. While the filters form a city skyline on the living room wall, with a cloudy and out-of-focus aspect, bringing the image caused by air pollution, the mirrored floor will reflect the landscape and architecture of the Park, and the visitor, placing in the same space the trees and also the marquee. The artist explains that this mirrored character of the floor must make the Glass Room a confusing place, as the public will not know very well what is to come, since everything around it will be within the same space.

The air-conditioning filters that make up the skyline in the work are all used, with the dark aspect of the “smoke mark”, as the artist calls it, given that the city's polluted air passed through them. The smoke trails are, in a way, part of the artist's trajectory, which she has already used as material to compose works in the series Tensão, Residuos da Cidade and Fumaça-ação. The stained character of these filters evokes a somewhat frightening tension, as it invites the audience to think that the same air passing through them is the air we breathe.

More information on the event can be found here.