Introduction

As the inaugural exhibition of the guest curator format "47m invites", 47m Contemporary is pleased to present "Double Two" - curated by Nuno de Brito Rocha - a duo-exhibition by the artists Jac Leirner (*1961, São Paulo, lives and works in São Paulo) and Rafa Silvares (*1984, Santos, BR, lives and works in Berlin).

The exhibition continues the artists' ongoing collaboration, in which their individual formal languages and thematic concerns come together in a concentrated and site-specific exchange.

Jac Leirner's installations "Hip Hop" (1998/2025) and "Street" (2026) initially unfold across the full horizontal volume of the exhibition spaces. The works are characteristic of the artist's practice, consisting of everyday consumable materials such as adhesive tape and stickers. Each element stands as an individual trace of a globalized everyday culture, in which the material functions as a basis for the circulation of goods and practices of consumption. Referencing both the art history of modernism and methods of music, "Hip Hop" incorporates the exhibition room as a spatial score composed of individual sequences. A new work created for this exhibition, "Street" (2026), occupies the domed hall of the Kunstverein in the Wünschmann-Haus. Rafa Silvares' paintings interact with and within Leirner's installations. Despite their figurative imagery, Silvares's treatment of surface, space, and color moves within a non-representational, abstract realm. His practice reflects on the rhythms of urban life and depicts the inanimate as being in motion.

In their encounter, "Double Two" creates a platform in which the artists' themes and modes of expression intensify, undermine, contrast with, and influence one another, ultimately entering into dialogue. The exhibition's site specificity also activates the historical dimensions of the location. The building, which was originally constructed between 1914 and 1917 and called the House of German Commercial Employees, has had various functions throughout its history connected to transport, commerce, the circulation of goods and people, as well as their dispossession — recurring themes that appear in different forms in the works of Leirner and Silvares.