“The exhibition And I Rise and Tell a Story, by Paula Parisot, brings together works produced between 2018 and 2026 — including paintings, videos, and newly created works — in a profound reflection on memory, the body, narrative, and survival. Curated by Cesar Oiticica, the exhibition presents a selection of works that have already been shown in international exhibitions such as Bienal Sur 2021 (Buenos Aires), Casa de América (Madrid), the National Society of Fine Arts (Lisbon), and the Brasília Museum of Art, alongside new paintings presented to the public for the first time.
The exhibition is grounded in the idea that telling a story means affirming one’s right to exist within it. In a world where so many narratives are shaped by power — whether legal, political, economic, or patriarchal — narrating one’s own life becomes an act of resistance. Who has the right to tell a story? Who owns a memory? What happens when a woman chooses to narrate herself, rejecting silence and the versions of her life constructed by others?
During a period of intense exchange between Paula Parisot and Portuguese writer Susana Moreira Marques, reflections emerged on motherhood, violence, displacement, silence, and survival. In one of the texts produced from this correspondence, Paula writes to Susana:
“Having the right to our own story, with everything it contains — both the difficult and the beautiful — is the only thing that makes life possible.””
“The phrase resonates throughout the entire exhibition. In the large-scale paintings, the intimate and collective videos, and the images that move between vulnerability and confrontation, Paula Parisot transforms personal experience into visual language. Her work does not seek to separate life and art; on the contrary, it asserts that the body, memory, and a woman’s lived experience are also political and aesthetic matter.
Leonardo Padura’s literature often returns to memory as a form of permanence and resistance against erasure. In And I Rise and Tell a Story, this resistance appears as an insistent gesture of endurance: standing up, speaking, remembering, recording. A refusal to allow only those who hold power to construct the official versions of the world.
The works gathered in the exhibition traverse years marked by geographical displacement, legal battles, motherhood, mourning, and reconstruction. At once deeply autobiographical and collective, the exhibition transforms individual experience into a space of recognition for other voices and other stories.
More than breaking the silence, Paula Parisot claims the right to her own narrative. In doing so, she invites the audience to ask: how many stories were interrupted before they ever had the chance to be told?”
Read the full article on the DASARTES website:: PAULA PARISOT | HÉLIO OITICICA MUNICIPAL ARTS CENTER
