Dalton Paula: Soul Kidnapper

Dalton Paula: O sequestrador de almas [Dalton Paula: Soul Kidnapper] collects works by the artist, featuring writing by anthropologist and historian Lilia Moritz Schwarcz about his production and work process. Through reading and discussing the history of the African diaspora in the country’s formation, the book presents the extended research — in trips, conversations, pictures, collages, journals — behind Dalton Paula’s paintings, drawings, installations, performances, videos and photos, centered around memory, past biographies and ancestral knowledge.

As an “archeologist of things”, Dalton Paula searches for traces and layers of these stories, often interrupted or invisible. The result “is a gallery of intimacy ghosts, that have never been so alive. A dive in the time of his ancestors, of their wandering and wisdom, remaining as an uncomfortable ‘present absence’ in the objects gaining life in the infinite space that is the landscape of relationships and memory itself,” writes Lilia Schwarcz.

About the authors
Dalton Paula was born in 1982 in Brasília (DF) and works in Goiânia (GO). He has a Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts. In 2022, he opened the show Dalton Paula: Retratos Brasileiros at MASP, and the installation Dalton Paula: Rota do Algodão, at Pinacoteca de São Paulo; in 2021, he was part of the Enciclopédia Negra exhibit at Pinacoteca de São Paulo; in 2020, he had his first solo show, Dalton Paula: Um Sequestrador de Almas, in New York, at the Alexander and Bonin Gallery. In the year 2019, he was one of the five artists awarded in the seventh edition of the CNI SESI SENAI Marcantonio Vilaça para as Artes Plásticas award, and also showed his work at the 36th Panorama da Arte Brasileira: Sertão, at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM). In 2018, he was selected by the Songs for Sabotage Triennial, at the New Museum in New York. He also participated in the 11th Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul – O Triângulo Atlântico, in Porto Alegre (RS), and showed hit work at Histórias Afro-Atlânticas (MASP and Instituto Tomie Ohtake). In 2017, he was part of the exhibit The Atlantic Triangle, at the Goethe Institute in Lagos, Nigeria, and in 2016 he was one of the artists invited for the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo.

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz is a senior professor at the Anthropology department of Universidade de São Paulo (USP). She was a global scholar (until 2018) and is currently a visiting professor at Princeton. Among other books, she’s the author of O espetáculo das raças (1993), As barbas do imperador (1998, Jabuti Book of the Year), Brasil: uma biografia (with Heloisa Murgel Starling, 2015) e Lima Barreto: Triste visionário (2017, Jabuti Best Biography). She won various literary awards, such as Jabuti, APCA, Biblioteca Nacional and the Anpocs book of the year in 2019.

Specifications
Title Dalton Paula: O sequestrador de almas
Authors Dalton Paula and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz
Language Portuguese, English
Page count 248
ISBN 978-65-5691-087-1
Design Daniel Trench
Format Hardcover
Size 20,8 x 27,7 cm
Year 2023