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?

On this floor, relationships between the sea, sound, movement, and accumulated objects create an experience akin to deviation. In Construtivismo naval II [Naval Constructivism II] (2008/2011) and Construtivismo musical [Musical Constructivism] (2010), Nelson Leirner draws respectively on the geometric forms of folded paper boats and piano keys to create three-dimensional images through repetition and the reduction of color and form. Here, the ocean appears less as a geographical location than as a symbolic field of transit, instability, and projection. Alongside these pieces, Sara Ramo’s Oceano possível [Possible Ocean] (2002) invites us to observe how objects slip free from predictable functions and begin to generate open-ended narratives infused with humor, excess, memory, and invention—with the playful freedom of imagining other possible stories.

What does art allow us to imagine that we are not yet able to fully name or live?

How do images and objects reshape our perception of reality through metaphor, deviation, and invention?

What happens when art generates instabilities that push us to imagine other possible worlds?