MAAT turns 3

Lisbon – MAAT (Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology) celebrates its third anniversary with a series of new exhibitions and a weekend of public programs and performances open and free to all.

New solo exhibitions featuring Angela Bulloch, João Pedro Vale and Nuno Alexandre Ferreira, and Vasco Barata are presented together with the 5th edition of Lisbon Architecture Triennale: Economy of Means and open to the public today. This new season brings together nationally and internationally renowned artists, with proposals from a range of different artistic languages.

The open weekend special programme includes concerts by The Legendary Tigerman, performances by Alice Joana Gonçalves with Daddy G (Massive Attack) and Isabel Costa, guided tours to the exhibitions and workshops for families.

Angela Bulloch
Anima Vectorias
Curated by Inês Grosso and João Ribas

In MAAT’s iconic Oval Gallery, Angela Bulloch presents Anima Vectorias, an immersive and multisensory experience, engaging the viewer with a series of moments in which various objects, archetypes, sounds, geometries and avatars coexist and interact—as shadows, doubles, and mirror images.

Angela Bulloch (Rainy River, Canada, 1966) emerged in the late 80s from the Young British Artist scene, or YBAs, of Goldsmith’s College in London, and has since worked with a variety of media to engage the relation of our behaviour and perceptions to systems, spaces, and abstractions. After having shown regularly in Portugal for over a decade, Bulloch was commissioned by MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology—to close the cycle of exhibitions for this year’s museum programme. Anima Vectorias, the artist’s first large-scale museum exhibition in Portugal, presents aspects of her long-term research and collaboration project in the fields of experimental music, sculpture, computation, and digital composition.

João Pedro Vale + Nuno A. Ferreira
Loving As The Road Begins
Curated by Inês Grosso

The duo João Pedro Vale and Nuno Alexandre Ferreira present Loving as the Road Begins, a new exhibition exploring subjects inherent to contemporary research on dissident forms of sexuality and non-normative gender identities. This exhibition is the culmination of a research project that took place in Paris during their artistic residency at La Cité Internationale des Arts, and borrows its title from a poem by Mário Cesariny, whose life and work serves as its thematic starting point.

On September 16, 1964, Mário Cesariny is admitted to the prison of Fresnes in France, accused of gross indecency following his arrest for soliciting a police officer at a Paris cinema. It is during his two-month incarceration that he writes the book A Cidade Queimada (Burnt City), a compilation of poems, drawings, collages and diary entries where he talks about his obsessive relationship with the Saint-Jacques Tower. This episode in Cesariny’s life leads the artists to develop another project conceived exclusively for MAAT’s Project Room, which takes the form of a reflection on spaces of control and the body as dissidence. They juxtapose an amalgamation of antagonistic references, evoking images of dirtiness/cleanliness; sickness/cure; and crime/punishment, associating the constructs of incarceration with lives lived on the margins. The exhibition calls to mind environments that manifest signs of queerness and its consciousness, while considering the perpetuation and reconfiguration of forms of imprisonment and appropriation.

Lisbon Architecture Trienal
Economy of Means
Curated by Éric Lapierre

MAAT will be hosting one of the main exhibitions, Economy of means, as part of this year’s theme The Poetics of Reason, for the 5th edition of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale. Curated by Éric Lapierre, it proposes economy of means as an aesthetic category as well as a tool of conception. It allows us to imagine and evaluate results. It is at the core of any relevant design, whatever the medium. As commonly understood it consists in using as few means as possible to attain a specific goal. Beyond this, we associate it with any attitude based upon a critical approach towards the means used to create something. Economy of means can concern process as well as results. It is an investigation of form in all its dimensions. Form is the horizon of any human activity pushed to a higher level of accomplishment. Economy of means is the DNA of good forms. Architecture is a process of defining the most appropriate form for a building. Using few and carefully considered means, this allows architects to endow their buildings with meaning and intelligibility.

Vascao Barata
Dreamers Never Learn
Curated by Carolina Grau

Vasco Barata presents a new project for Ashpit 8, Dreamers Never Learn. Barata has been exploring the interstitials of the image and the space between the visible and the invisible, materiality and immateriality. For this project the artist transforms the exhibition space into an installation where visitors are submerged in a semi-abandoned urban environment. This space exists somewhere between being physically “occupied” and showing the aftermath of a flood and its remains. Dreamers Never Learn (Tidal) intends to intimate the temporary free space which is liberated in-between the flux of the economical tides. During the financial crisis, society was plunged into a state of survival mode at every level. Foreign investment seized the moment to speculate in real estate, flooding the market. The constant cycle of tides uncovers a free space creating new transitory borders; thus providing opportunities for human waves of immigration looking for a new beginning, as well as for the capitalist-driven investors seeking opportunities to strike new deals.