Wall
June 12–August 22, 2021
Rua D. Manuel II (Jardins do Palácio de Cristal)
4050-346 Porto
Portugal
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10am–6pm
T +351 22 507 3305
galeriamunicipal@agoraporto.pt
Curated by Guilherme Blanc.
Wall is the result of an invitation made to the Argentinian-Israeli artist Inés Moldavsky to revisit and expand, in an installation context, her film The Men Behind the Wall, Golden Bear winner at the Berlinale—Berlin International Film Festival—in 2018. In this filmic work a dating app is used to create a set of conversations and personal meetings with Palestinian men living in the Gaza strip and the West Bank.
The digital gateway is utilized as a starting point to visit the two territories, in journeys where the tension becomes evident through the visual and sonic landscape and, also, by virtue of the linguistic expression. In the project developed for the Galeria Municipal do Porto, the artist further explores her proposal of crossing borders—digital, political, religious and of gender—by building a frank and, therefore, provocative exercise of conversational intimacy and analysis.
The specific context of affective and sexual interactions in the digital age continues to serve as a subtle backdrop to analyse questions of segregation, while proposing to discuss power relations through various stereotypes.
In a particularly tense period between the states of Israel and Palestine, Wall attests to the validity of the continuing need for political debate about the question of Israeli occupation, while simultaneously proposing a meta-political reading of issues of love, respect and equality.
For media inquiries:
Hernâni Batista: hernanibatista [at] agoraporto.pt
Tiago Guimaraes Dias Santos: tiagosantos [at] agoraporto.pt