This article proposes a study of the gradual transformation of the artistic field over the last decade. This field at the beginning of the century was divided into two large groups. On the one hand, we had a production still predominantly linked to Modernity, to its abstract developments and that was contained within the scope of ‘art for art’s sake’. On the other hand, more and more active artists have emerged in the building of a resilient cultural memory including the agendas of gender and racial minorities. From the middle of the last decade, there has been also a new urgency in this field: the need to revise the history of Brazil, either to show continuities between the colonial past and our authoritarian present, or to retrieve the memory of the 1964–85 dictatorship, which until then was practically not thematized by post-dictatorial artists. The text discusses to what extent this artistic movement that proposes a historical revision can link a history of violence against minorities with the denial of the arbitrariness that characterized the dictatorial period. Politicians currently in power create educational programmes aimed at presenting the dictatorial period as the pinnacle of the country’s history. In response to this revisionist and denialist movement, artists and academics are developing ways to record and present a counter-history that must underpin new political struggles that are now being articulated.