ANA PAULA SIRINO

Ana Paula Sirino (Brazil, 1997) is a self-taught visual artist whose practice is deeply rooted in her lived experience within the quilombola region of Torra. Working primarily with photography and oil painting, her research investigates relationships between memory, territory, and permanence, articulating visual and symbolic references drawn from quilombola contexts and from ways of life shaped beyond major urban centers. Her work reflects on how place, ancestry, and daily coexistence inform modes of seeing and remembering.

Sirino’s paintings emerge from a personal archive of images produced through her close relationships with family and friends. From this intimate material, she constructs compositions that reconfigure gestures, figures, and atmospheres, allowing everyday scenes to take on a heightened symbolic charge. Through these reassemblages, the works operate as sites of affirmation, contributing to the historical, emotional, and symbolic visibility of Afro-diasporic narratives embedded in contemporary quilombola life.

Her practice engages memory not as a fixed record, but as a living process shaped by affection, continuity, and collective presence. By translating photographic references into painterly form, Sirino introduces subtle shifts in temporality and perception, emphasizing the persistence of shared histories within the present. The resulting images carry a sense of permanence that resists erasure, foregrounding the quiet strength of communal bonds and inherited ways of being.

Sirino has presented her work widely in Brazil, participating in exhibitions such as O sertão é nosso centro (Centro Cultural Octo Marques, Goiânia, 2025), Meu quintal é maior que o mundo (Casa Triângulo, São Paulo, 2025), and Dos Brasis (SESC Belenzinho, São Paulo, 2023). She has held a solo exhibition, Nos Olhos do Começo (Galeria Rodrigo Ratton, Belo Horizonte, 2022), and taken part in major group shows, art fairs, and institutional projects across São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Belo Horizonte.