13 Shots
June 29–September 10, 2018
Calouste Gulbenkian Museum
Modern Collection - Project Space
Rua Dr. Nicolau de Bettencourt
1050-078 Lisbon, Portugal
Hours: Wednesday–Sunday 10am–6pm
Free entry
Curated by Ana Cristina Cachola, Daniela Agostinho and Luísa Santos
Publication launch and round-table Conviviality and Institutional
Monday, September 10, 5pm
The work of Aimée Zito Lema (Amsterdam, 1982) addresses the dynamics between individual and collective memory, with a particular focus on the recording and intergenerational transmission of events, both through material history and through the human body as a mnemonic repository. Placing aesthetic and social practices side by side, her work inhabits a world of critical interaction between the material and the human.
13 Shots brings together a body of work—developed in collaboration with the Grupo Teatro do Oprimido [Group Theatre of the Oppressed] of Lisbon—that explores several aspects of individual, social, and political memory. Through performative exercises co-created by the artist and the Group in the Museum’s Multipurpose Room, the intergenerational transmission of the Carnation Revolution and the photographic archive of Gulbenkian become material for enquiring how memory is passed on through vernacular stories, images, gaps, and silences that are reproduced, filled, and reimagined collectively. Rather than trying to decipher the past or resolve the present, Aimée Zito Lema’s work attempts to render visible the complexity of the processes by which memory is transmitted and materialised through different media, images, layers, and gestures of both conflict and conviviality.
The project presented here is the result of the artist’s residency at Rua das Gaivotas 6, and part of the Multi-Chapter Exhibition developed by 4Cs: From Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture, an European Cooperation Project coordinated by Universidade Católica Portuguesa and co-financed by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
The eight chapters of the exhibition are designed with the same concept in mind—the transition from conflict to conviviality in a Europe facing challenges arising from new forms of conflict which urgently call for alternative solutions. Through the voice of the institutions writing it—Universidade Católica Portuguesa; Tensta Konsthall; SAVVY Contemporary; Royal College of Art; Fundació Antoni Tàpies; Vilnius Academy of Arts; Museet for Samtidskunst; and ENSAD—each chapter recounts its own story relating to the (im)possibilities of this transition, contributing to the production of a non-linear narrative.