Ângela Ferreira
Hard Rain Show
Curator Jürgen Bock
27 November 2008 – 1st February 2009
Commeurec – halles centrales
35000 Rennes, France
la-criee [at] ville-rennes.fr
Exhibition 27 November 2008 – 1st February 2009 at La Criée Contemporary Art Centre
and 27 November 2008 – 17 January 2009 at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Rennes.
Opening : Thursday 27 November 2009 at 6:30 pm at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and at 7pm at La Criée.
Ângela Ferreira is one of Portugal’s most engaging contemporary artists. Over the last twenty years the artist has created an extensive body of work in which she interrogates geo-political, art historical and gender issues related to given cultural contexts using a range of different media. Her installations frequently include sculptures that evoke modernists vocabularies, combined with text, semi-documentary photographs and videos. Throughout her career, Ferreira has scrutinized the use of theories, in particular art historical theories, and their relationship with and impact on contemporary art, calling on art’s inherent potential to negotiate complex subject matter.
Born in Mozambique in 1958 (when it was still a Portuguese colony), Ângela Ferreira studied in South Africa and has since the early 1990s divided her time between Portugal and South Africa. Her complex background constitutes the root of all her work. Her in-between status, inherent to the identity of many Portuguese, drives her intense exploration of different universes in centres and peripheries, highlighting the importance of perspective.
Her first solo exhibition in France is an opportunity for the French audience to engage with Ferreira’s oeuvre. On show at La Criée is Maison Tropicale, created in 2007 for the Portuguese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The work is inspired by the history of a failed modernist housing project by the French designer Jean Prouvé, designed in the late 1940s for the then French colonies Niger and Congo. Two other works are presented at the Ecole des Beaux-arts in Rennes. In For Mozambique (Model No.2 of a Screen-Orator-Kiosk celebrating a post-independence Utopia) (2008) Ferreira focuses on the historical momentum of the recently independent country Mozambique in 1975, linking it to the history of the modernist utopia of Russian constructivism. Her third major installation in Rennes, entitled Zip Zap Circus School, opens up a discursive space between what is considered typically European and African architecture by connecting two never built projects: a Mies van der Rohe 1913 bourgeois villa in Holland and a project by the Mozambican architect Pancho Guedes for a Circus School in Cape Town, designed in the 1990s.
In partnership with the Museu Colecção Berardo, Lisbon
With the support of the Camões Institute, Portugal
The Hard Rain Show is part of the European Cultural Season, which marks France’s presidency of the European Union from 31 July to 31 December 2008
Collaboration with the Ecole Régionale des Beaux-Arts de Rennes
La Criée place Honoré Commeurec – halles centrales
35000 Rennes, France
tel.: (+33) (0)2 23 62 25 10
fax (+33) (0)2 23 62 25 19
la-criee@ville-rennes.fr
www.criee.org
