Anish Kapoor: Works, Thoughts, Experiments / Contemporary Projects: Martine Syms — Lessons I— CLXXX / Besides, History: Go Hasegawa, Kersten Geers, David Van Severen

Anish Kapoor: Works, Thoughts, Experiments 
The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art presents a major exhibition of works by Anish Kapoor (Mumbai, India, 1954), one of the world’s leading contemporary artists. The exhibition will be presented across the 18-hectare Serralves Park together with a presentation in the Serralves Museum of architectural models conceived over the course of the past forty years. This will be the first solo exhibition in Portugal dedicated to the work of Anish Kapoor. Conceived across multiple sites in the Serralves Park, the exhibition will present five large-scale sculptures, some newly conceived, that present the artist´s iconic languages of form and material, from works such as Sky Mirror, to the dramatic sculpting of the landscape itself. Kapoor’s works take on the mythic qualities and symbolic relationships of landscape. Bringing earth and sky, horizon and dark interior together, his sculptures traverse boundaries and shift meaning. In dialogue with the works in the Park there will be an exhibition in the museum of the artist’s models. Made for works and ideas on an architectural scale, model making as a tool for thinking about form and scale has always been a central process in Kapoor’s studio practice. They present emerging ideas about space that he has come back to again and again, and reveal the importance of experimentation and process as a means to transformation.

Born in Mumbai and based in London, Kapoor achieved international recognition in the 1980s as a member of the generation of new British sculptors. Since then, he has developed an oeuvre which stands out for its immense diversity and ambition, and has embraced both the intimacy of un-certain objects in interior space to the monumental scale of the urban and rural landscape.

Anish Kapoor: Works, Thoughts, Experiments is organized by the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Suzanne Cotter, Director, Mudam Luxembourg ― Musée d’art moderne Grand-Duc Jean.

Contemporary Projects: Martine Syms—Lessons I‒ CLXXX
Lessons I‒CLXXX is an ongoing, incomplete video work composed of 30-second clips—a cumulative poem whose structure evolves at random. Snapshots of disconnected experiences and subjects accumulate into a mass of fragmentary narratives, relating (directly and incidentally) to the lives of black Americans. Drawn from myriad sources—including YouTube videos, 1980s TV shows, Vines and personal footage—the Lessons form a growing corpus that Martine Syms (Los Angeles, 1988) has been making since 2014. Syms’ recently presented exhibitions include Projects 106: Martine Syms, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Fact and Trouble, ICA London; COM PORT MENT, Karma International, Los Angeles; Vertical Elevated Oblique, Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York. She currently runs Dominica Publishing, an imprint dedicated to exploring blackness in visual culture.

Contemporary Projects: Martine Syms Lessons I‒CLXXX is curated by João Ribas, Director of the Serralves Museum

Besides, History: Go Hasegawa, Kersten Geers, David Van Severen
June 28, 7pm: Opening tour with Giovanna Borasi (CCA) and Carles Muro (Serralves Museum), followed by a reception
June 29, 6:30pm: Presentations by and conversations with Go Hasegawa, Kersten Geers, David Van Severen, Giovanna Borasi, and Carles Muro

This exhibition presents an ongoing conversation, initiated by Giovanna Borasi, between herself, Go Hasegawa of Go Hasegawa and Associates in Tokyo, Japan, and Kersten Geers and David Van Severen of OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen in Brussels, Belgium—and the history of architecture. Through the conversation format, each architect rereads, redraws, translates, and appropriates from the past and from each other’s work to challenge historical categories such as authorship and reference.

Although their practices are based on different continents, Go Hasegawa, Kersten Geers, and David Van Severen in engaging each other’s work, uncover their shared concerns and approaches to the history of architecture. Together they confront the audience with history as something that can be used, rather than simply studied.

This exhibition is organized by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) and curated by Giovanna Borasi, Chief Curator at the CCA. Curatorial adaptation by Carles Muro, Adjunct Curator for Architecture Programmes at the Serralves Museum.

Tarek Atoui: I/E Porto
I/E is an archaeology of sound cracking into hidden frameworks of the city by the Paris-based Lebanese artist and musician. Sounds are recorded from below the surface, the sea and the underground world, moving upwards in an attempt to locate, decipher and understand the identity of the place. Atoui collaborates with sound recordist Eric La Casa using different microphones to create a sound scan on a macro and micro scale. The research process will be developed during a residency at Sonoscopia. The recordings are the point of departure for a composition and perfor­mances featuring Atoui, La Casa and Alberto Lopes, Gustavo Costa and Henrique Fernandes.

I/E Porto by Tarek Atoui is curated by Pedro Rocha, music curator, Serralves Museum.


About Serralves
The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art is the foremost museum for contemporary art in Portugal, and one of Europe’s most renowned institutions for contemporary art and culture. Uniquely sited on the grounds of the Serralves Foundation in Porto―which also comprises an 18-hectare Park and the Serralves Villa, a landmark art deco building―the Museum designed by Álvaro Siza opened in 1999. Through its exhibitions, collection, publications, performing arts, and public programmes, Serralves fosters the understanding and appreciation of contemporary art and culture in Portugal and around the world.