Berna Reale (Born in Belém do Pará, 1965) lives and works in Belém in the State of Pará.
Berna Reale is one of the most important artists in the contemporary Brazilian art scene and is acclaimed as one of the main exponents of performance art in the country. Reale began her artistic career in the early 1990s. Her first major work, Cerne (at the 25th Art Salon of Pará, 2006), a photographic intervention at the Meat Market located at the Ver-o-Peso market complex, led the artist to work as a forensic expert at the Centro de Pericias Renato Chaves from 2010 onwards. Since then, Reale has been exploring her own body as a central aesthetic element of her performances, photographs, and videos. Her work, marked by a critical engagement with the material and symbolic aspects of violence as well as the silencing processes present in the most diverse instances of society, investigates the importance of images in maintaining imaginaries and brutal actions. The force of Reale’s work lies in the contrast between the desire for closeness and the feeling of disgust, eliciting the irony that results from the combination of society’s fascination and aversion to violence. Photography plays a fundamental role in Reale’s practice. It is not only the means of registering and perpetuating the artist’s actions but also the very unfolding of her creative process.