Elida Tessler

Elida Tessler, born in Porto Alegre in 1961, is a prominent artist and professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). Her work deeply explores the intersections between literature and visual arts, investigating the connections between the written word and the visual image.

Along with Jailton Moreira, Tessler founded the Torreão, a significant contemporary art space in Porto Alegre, which operated from 1993 to 2009. According to the artist, Torreão was conceived as a space for coexistence, open to the public, focused on research in visual arts, teaching, and guidance of artistic projects, as well as promoting interventions in the distinctive space of the house's tower, which has a 4x4 meter room with 12 windows. During its 16 years of activities, Torreão hosted 89 artists from various generations and backgrounds, who contributed their own interpretations of the space.

Tessler also coordinates the .p.a.r.t.e.s.c.r.i.t.a. group, a laboratory at UFRGS that brings together artists at various academic levels to work on integrating word, image, and text in the visual arts.

Between June and August 2013, Tessler had a retrospective of her work, "Elida Tessler: intuitive grammar", curated by Glória Ferreira at the Iberê Camargo Foundation. The exhibition featured 14 works that mainly dialogued with literature, such as the project "The Man Without Qualities word search", where the artist removes all adjectives from Robert Musil's novel and creates a word search in the exhibition space, and "My Name is Also Red", based on Orhan Pamuk's novel, where she highlights words related to the color red.

Since 2004, Tessler has been working on the project "You Give Me Your Word", collecting words from people's daily lives and recording them on clothespins, an intervention that highlights the materiality and weight of words in everyday life.

In 2000, she published "Unfinished Talks: objects and a poem", in collaboration with poet Manoel Ricardo de Lima, further exploring the relationship between text and object in the artistic context.

Sources:
Photo: https://www.elidatessler.site/contato
Text: Blombô research and curation, with the support of artificial intelligence for content writing and structuring.