Halfway through May, in what is becoming Lisbon’s Art Week, MAAT will be teaming up with ARCOlisboa and opening five exhibitions simultaneously.
The first exhibition is the biennial show of EDP Foundation New Artists Award, one of the most renowned prizes in Portugal. Reflecting EDP Foundation’s considerable investment in supporting new talents in Portuguese contemporary art, this year’s edition brings together new works by finalists Isabel Madureira Andrade, Ana Mary Bilbao, Dealmeida Esilva, Mónica de Miranda, Henrique Pavão and Diana Policarpo. Based on the presentations, the winner of the prize will be selected by an international jury and announced during the exhibition. The EDP Foundation New Artists Award is curated by Inês Grosso, João Silvério and Sara Antónia Matos and takes place in Central Tejo’s Central 1.
In MAAT’s iconic Oval Gallery, Jesper Just presents two interlinked video installations, in a site-specific intervention curated by Pedro Gadanho and Irene Campolmi. Servitudes – Circuits (Interpassivities) brings together two major pieces from the artist’s recent work: Servitudes, an 8-channel video installation presented for the first time in 2015, in the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris, and Circuits (Interpassivities), a multimedia piece now presented for the first time in a museum context. Just makes use of constructions, video and sound to transform the exhibition into an emotional journey around bodies, artificial prostheses, and the human condition at the present moment.
The Project Room and Boiler Hall are occupied, respectively, by Portuguese artists Carla Filipe and Pedro Tudela, with solo projects conceived especially for these two museum spaces. The solo exhibition by Carla Filipe, continues Filipe’s research into the visual and graphic strategies used in the political narrative, specifically protest banners. The project presents a set of symbols and graphic images taken from the political post-25 April 1974 narrative, while removing all manual plasticity from it. Amanhã não há arte is curated by Luís Silva and João Mourão and represents an attempt at mobilisation in the face of the challenges confronting the art community. The exhibition by Pedro Tudela is curated by Miguel von Hafe Pérez and turns the Boiler Hall into an awdiˈtɔrju, a phonetic transcription of the word “auditório” (auditorium), transforming it into the stage for an immersive experience featuring a sound piece accompanied by three moments, where one sculpture and two installations inhabit the space in a designed choreography, based on various elements.
Finally, French artist Xavier Veilhan inaugurates the roof of MAAT’s building as an exhibition space with the presentation of a sculptural installation composed of an intriguing ensemble of a female figure and a pack of dogs. With statues in cast aluminium playing with notions of scale and estrangement, Veilhan’s installation is curated by Pedro Gadanho and Rita Marques, and adds an extra element of surprise to one of the most stunning vistas in the city of Lisbon.
This multiple exhibition opening will be accompanied by a party that celebrates ARCO LISBOA’s third edition in the city. On the night of May 15, all the exhibitions currently on view at the museum will be open to the public until midnight, including the first major retrospective of Barcelona-based artist Carlos Bunga, curated by Iwona Blaswick, a solo show by Portuguese artist Ana Santos, as well as Fiction and Fabrication: Photography of Architecture after the Digital Turn, an extensive survey of manipulated and altered representations of the built environment coinciding with the thirtieth anniversary of the invention of software tool Photoshop, with work by Doug Aitken, Olivier Boberg, James Casabere, David Claerbout, Celine Condorelli, Gregory Crewdson, Hans Op de Beeck, Thomas Demand, Filip Dujardin, Roland Fischer, Carlos Garaicoa, Nicolas Grospierre, Andreas Gursky, Beate Gütschow, Patrick Hamilton, Veronika Kellndorfer, Edgar Martins, Antoni Muntadas, Thomas Ruff, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jeff Wall, James Welling, and many others.
Mid-career survey of Vasco Araújo’s work and a show by artistic duo Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela open in June 4 in Power Station Building
Closing the Summer season at MAAT, the artist duo Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela occupy the Ashpit 8 project space with Midnight, an exhibition that presents a series of unseen works resulting from recent use of cyanotype—a traditional process of fixing images through the exposure of a sensitised surface to ultraviolet light. The result of this multi-disciplinary mix of sculptural, installation and cinematic elements is not just unique, but unexpected.
Finally, the exhibition A Moment Apart by offers a cross-sectional perspective on Vasco Araújo’s work, based on the link established by the artist between the performability of voice and body, through specific devices combining different visual objects. In the work of Vasco Araújo, the voice appears as the space for building both individual and collective identities that create images to confront fiction and reality. The exhibition will start with the performance of Libertas – Da condição de pessoa livre (Libertas—On the condition of the free person) followed by an open call for public participation in a peaceful march to the singing of the chorus of slaves from Verdi’s opera “Nabucco.”
