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 the top floor, the pace begins to slow. Some works call for sustained contemplation; others evoke stillness, or silent unease. The space becomes a field of active listening and transit. The works of Lenora de Barros, Rubens Gerchman, Rodrigo Andrade, and Amelia Toledo seem to ask of the viewer not only observation, but also a willingness to embrace that which resists immediate resolution. Fabulation emerges here as an exercise of critical imagination. To imagine is to create other ways of understanding reality—whether through the refusal to see, political tension, chromatic clashes, or the realization that we are always being perceived as we move through space.

Perhaps that is exactly what art generates when it creates instabilities: it momentarily disrupts the automatic habits of perception, making room for other ways of existing, relating, and thinking. Look and See invites viewers to remain within that uncertain territory between seeing, recognizing, imagining, and not yet fully understanding what they have encountered.

How does art turn individual experiences into shared experiences?

What happens when different bodies, histories, and perspectives engage with the same work?

How does looking at images, objects, and narratives also reshape the way we perceive one another?