Vivian Braga dos Santos

Vivian Braga dos Santos – PhD in Art History from the University of Sao Paulo (USP, Brazil) and researcher (pensionnaire) at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA, France). Her work examines the relationship between contemporary art, political conflicts, history and memory. In her doctoral work, she developed the concept of function-historian (2018): a new relationship between the contemporary artist, his/her artistic practice and the political conflicts of his time, which avoids the limits of the artist-witness model. Currently, she is focusing on a project about the tensions between contemporary art and conflicts over racial issues, particularly in the Brazilian artistic scene. She has investigated the presence of European representations of blacks, carried out between the 16th and 19th centuries, in the works of Brazilian Afro-descendant artists and the participation of this contemporary production in a possible counter-image movement of Western representations.