The exhibition Look and See: MAM São Paulo Visits SESC Bom Retiro is conceived through an encounter between works from the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo (MAM São Paulo) and the SESC Collection of Art. It is organized around a provocative question: how can art become a public experience? By moving works from a museum into the everyday life of a multifaceted cultural center like SESC, the show foregrounds contemporary artistic production, structures of mediation that sustain exhibitions, and also ways of organizing, preserving, narrating, and bringing these underlying choices into view. Each change of setting gives rise to new relationships among the works in these collections, highlighting the fact that, for anyone, the perception of art is also shaped by personal experience, institutional decisions, and forms of mediation, leading us to questions such as: who determines what to show and how to show it? When, and from what perspective, are we invited to engage with these productions and speak about them?

Every exhibition creates a perceptual landscape. Artworks, walls, sounds, corridors, lighting, and stairways dictate how we perceive space and occupy it. In Look and See, the SESC Bom Retiro building actively participates in this experience, listening to, accompanying, and reshaping the encounters between art and the public.

From the moment they arrive from the street, visitors cross a hybrid threshold between the city and the cultural institution. Urban noise, the flow of people, and the neighborhood’s daily bustle do not fade away when one enters the building.

Amelia Toledo’s As paredes têm ouvidos [The Walls Have Ears] (1975) is a tangible presence throughout the exhibition floors. The building’s architecture seems to capture these external currents—footsteps, voices, memories, conflicts, and forms of public coexistence—as we see in Claudio Tozzi’s Multidão [Crowd] (1968) and Rubens Gerchman’s Lute [Fight] (1967/2005). The pieces relate directly to this sense of transit, encounter, and invitation.

What does a cultural institution hear, retain, and reveal about forms of public coexistence? 

How do spaces shape what we perceive, feel, and remember in an exhibition?

How do artworks, architecture, and circulation create landscapes of experience and movement?