Hammer Projects: Gê Viana

Gê Viana is a visual artist working in collage, sound, video, and installation to explore material culture, oral history, and syncretism within the African diaspora across Brazil. Viana's practice moves between domestic, urban, and rural spaces and blends analog and digital forms of collage with painting and early twentieth-century photographic processes. Her work challenges the accuracies of traditional archives, filling the gaps sustained by institutional memory with evocative images and sounds that illustrate the fullness of Afro-Brazilian identity and heritage. Through her multidisciplinary practice, Viana uplifts the history, traditions, and dignity of her communities. For her Hammer Project, Viana will present an installation and new sculpture, including her short film _Radiola de promessa_ (Radio of promise, 2025). The film documents quotidian life in deep rural parts of her home state, Maranhão, in northeast Brazil. In Radiola de promessa, the body is like a repertoire of ancestral African rhythms, songs, dances, and memories that remixes the past with the present. Faith, sound, and belonging coalesce at the heart of this work as Viana explores the ways in which reggae music weaves together the cultural memory of the land in Maranhão. _Hammer Projects: Gê Viana_ will be the artist’s first institutional presentation in the United States.