The Museum as Performance

Asuna, Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Frédéric Gies, Hannah Catherine Jones a.k.a Foxy Moron, Catarina Miranda, Vera Mota, Xavier Paes, Rui Penha/João Dias, Fatima Al Qadiri, Nora Turato

The Museum as Performance recognizes the growing significance of performance in contemporary art and further contributes to the history of Serralves as a pioneer cross-disciplinary museum. Encompassing dance, spoken narratives, visual and musical/sound performances, The Museum as Performance encourages new directions in the relationship between live performance and the visual arts. For its fourth edition Serralves presents twelve new performance works, most of them national premieres, across the spaces of the Serralves Museum and Villa.

The Museum as Performance is curated by Cristina Grande, Serralves programmer of dance and performance, Pedro Rocha, Serralves programmer of music, and Ricardo Nicolau, curator of the Museum.

About the artists:

Asuna
Asuna is a young Japanese artist that makes use of various keyboards, electronics, old organs and sound toys for children to make his own brand of drone music / electronica. His music blends influences from lo-fi pop, freak folk, noise, punk, minimal and Tokyo’s improvisation scene.

Alex Baczynski-Jenkins
Alex Baczynski-Jenkins is a London and Warsaw-based artist and choreographer. His practice is concerned with the mediation and politics of affect, desire and embodiment. Often taking social, everyday performances, he amplifies and mutates them to produce affective spaces of re-imagining and undoing normativity.

Frédéric Gies
Frédéric Gies is a French Stockholm-based dancer and choreographer. Gies’ work focuses on the articulation between dance, choreography and politics, and is informed by his participation in techno clubs and rave cultures. The dance he creates collapse in various ways the hierarchies and distinctions between different dance forms.   

Hannah Catherine Jones a.k.a. Foxy Moron
Hannah Catherine Jones is a London-based artist, researcher and composer. Under the pseudonym Foxy Moron, she creates works that juxtapose ancient musical modalities with sci-fi timbres. These “sounds in opposition” are a vehicle to think through the painful legacies of slavery, but also the conceptual possibilities of Afrofuturism.

Catarina Miranda
Catarina Miranda is a Portuguese artist working with languages that intercept image, movement, voice, scenography and light, approaching the body as a vessel for the transformation and mediation of hypnagogic states, as well as for the gestures and procedures of an acute conscience of the here and now.

Vera Mota
Vera Mota is a Portuguese artist whose practice, encompassing performance, sculpture, drawing and installation, highlights the physical qualities of carefully selected materials. Visually related to minimalist, her work points to the conflict between a quest for order and a simultaneous fascination with the possibilities of chance.

Xavier Paes
Xavier Paes is a Portuguese artist working in the fields of visual arts, performance and experimental music. His practice explores and potentiates, namely through friction and percussion, the production of sound by everyday objects—wood stakes, metal lockers—in a ritualistic approach to primitivism that transport the viewer/listener to distant times, archaic dimensions.

Rui Penha/João Dias
Rui Penha is a Portuguese composer, media artist and performer of electroacoustic music. His recent production includes interfaces for musical expression, sound spatialization software, interactive installations, musical robots, and autonomous improvisers. One of his latest compositions will be performed by João Dias, a young percussionist who has recently graduated in percussion performance.

Fatima Al Qadiri
Fatima Al Qadiri is a Senegal-born, Kuwait-raised and Berlin-based artist. A musician, composer, DJ and visual artist, her work, encompassing electronic music, video, installation and DJ-sets explores themes related to war, sociocultural identities, concepts of beauty and taste, and Western perceptions of non-European cultures.

Nora Turato
Nora Turato is a Zagreb-born, Amsterdam-based artist. In her spoken word performances, Turato uses slices of daily conversations, literature, social media posts, politics and (personal) frustration, that merge into an impulsive, passionate and melodic soundscape: a stand-up poetic slam, that flirts with hip-hop and punk, moves between citing and singing, and verbalizes rhythmic beats.

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.