Álvaro Siza : In/discipline

The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art presents in/discipline, a major exhibition that covers over six decades of the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza’s trajectory featuring a variety of original documents: thirty projects—designed between 1954 and 2019, both built and unbuilt—presented only through drawings and models; records from his period of studies and authorial affirmation; sketchbooks with drawings and annotations; seminal editions and author photographs on his oeuvre; and also statements by individuals who encountered it through time. This initiative is also a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art—one of the architect’s major works—highlighting the building’s interior architecture as the “support” for the exhibition project. 

The exhibition reveals the salutary disquiet and rebelliousness of the architect’s creative method, shaped at the intersection of knowledges, cultures, geographies, works and authors. Throughout his trajectory, Álvaro Siza has questioned architecture both from within and outside the discipline. A disbeliever in “specialization,” he conceives and constructs his projects via an interdisciplinary exploration of the potentials of context, drawing and form: place by place, work by work. 

The hundreds of documents on show—gathered with the participation of the institutions that received his professional archive, as well as private contributions and the author’s personal collection—are witness to his creative approach and reconstruct a cohesive whole through materials that are now partly scattered through various collections.

Curated by Nuno Grande and Carles Muro, the exhibition is organised by the Serralves Foundation — Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, with key contributions from the Álvaro Siza fonds — Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, the Álvaro Siza Archive — Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, and the Serralves’ Álvaro Siza Archive.

The exhibition is accompanied by a book that presents a large selection of Siza’s drawings, sketches and personal annotations produced during the conception, construction or completion of the 30 projects featured in the exhibition together with the input from several contributors who wrote about Siza’s architecture, portrayed his work, or found personal references in it. 

Also on view:

Nora Turato: someone ought to tell you what it’s really all about   
October 3, 2019–January 19, 2020
Nora Turato (Zagreb, 1993) is one of the most compelling young artists working today. The exhibition presents a videowork shot in the Serralves Auditorium in which, inspired by John Cassavetes’ acclaimed film Opening Night (1977), Turato incarnates an emotionally disturbed actress. someone ought to tell you what it’s really all about is integrated in the Contemporary Projects programme, a dynamic, responsive platform for the presentation of the work of some of the most relevant contemporary artists active today. 

someone ought to tell you what it’s really all about is organized by the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Ricardo Nicolau, curator of the Museum.  

Alessandro Bosetti
Regular Mesures 
October 16–20

The sound project and installation Regular Measures is part of a series of pieces and of an ongoing research drawing from an alternative theory of voice as emergence and autonomous entity, exploring utopian new possibilities and concepts of polyphony as community. The project revolves around a sound universe whose perceivable reality and everchanging landscapes are solely constituted by voices reorganizing themselves as the guests inhabiting it determine its future shape.

This iteration of Regular Measures as a live installation is organized by the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Pedro Rocha, Serralves’ curator of music and performance.