The spring/summer programme at maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon brings together a diverse range of events that reinforce the museum’s intention to open its doors to the various cultural agents and audiences in the city, with a special focus on those who are usually less inclined to visit or to whom access has been denied in recent decades.
Given the latest political developments, now more than ever, the museum should represent a critical and safe space where various communities and sensibilities can come together to discuss the complexities of our collective future, democracy and freedom.
Traverser la nuit and Gabinete
Traverser la nuit, curated by Noëlig Le Roux, presents a broad overview of Antoine de Galbert’s personal collection in Portugal for the first time. Providing an endless source of inspiration for artists, the night continues to permeate and infuse art with the philosophical, political, societal, ecological and scientific questions it raises. The night can evoke both hope and dread, but it is also a time and place for the freedom and transgression that offer such fertile ground for creation and are echoed in Antoine de Galbert’s collection. The exhibition features works by artists such as Annette Messager, Christian Boltanski, Constantin Brâncuși, Didier Faustino, Francesca Woodman, Joan Fontcuberta, Jorge Molder, Lucio Fontana, Mari Katayama, Marina Abramović, Pilar Albarracín, Raoul Hausmann, André Kertész, Thomas Ruff, W. Eugene Smith and Zhang Huan.
Opening together with Traverser la nuit was Gabinete, the new venue at maat intended to expand and diversify the creative responses to the work of artists in the EDP Foundation Portuguese Art Collection and the contemporary art scene. Gabinete provides these artists with a freer space in which to experiment with new formats and show previously unseen work or work that runs parallel to their studio practices. The first artist to exhibit in Gabinete is Luisa Cunha (Lisbon, 1949) with the sound work Não [No] (2018), which was recently acquired for the collection.
Urban Cultures: Prisma and Interferences
Prisma by the Portuguese artist Alexandre Farto, aka Vhils, unveiled today at maat, is a monumental and unexpected work that relies solely on video, a language that the artist has been increasingly exploring. This large-scale installation, comprising slow-motion footage—images of everyday life in nine major cities (Beijing, Cincinnati, Hong Kong, Lisbon, Los Angeles, Macao, Mexico City, Paris and Shanghai)—projected on screens, transforms the museum’s Oval Gallery into a veritable urban labyrinth that affords visitors a truly immersive experience in a construction that manipulates and distorts the effects of space, scale and light.
Based on explorations of urban cultures, the group exhibition Interferences, curated by Alexandre Farto, António Brito Guterres and Carla Cardoso, also addresses various themes that structure the design of the metropolis, engaging in dialogues with the latter and its actors. The cultural diversity that characterises Lisbon does not soften the many stories of a segmented and antagonistic metropolis. This exhibition affirms different expressions of urban culture, exploring narrative itineraries of the city in a conversation that prioritises the museum as a critical space where various communities and sensibilities come together as a starting point for new beginnings. maat will therefore be a platform for attempted utopias, timeless struggles, emerging tensions and stories told and yet to be told.
As part of Interferences, a collective mural entitled Painel do Mercado do Povo (The People’s Market Panel) by the Movimento Democrático dos Artistas Plásticos [Artists for Democracy Movement] on June 10, 1974 will be reinterpreted. This project will take place in maat’s gardens and will be included in the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Revolution of the Carnations (25 April 1974) beginning in 2022. Forty-eight artists will be invited, some of whom helped to create the original panel, artists from the exhibition and others who have carved a prominent place in the Portuguese art scene over the last 50 years of democracy.
Visual Natures: The Politics and Culture of Environmentalism in the 20th and 21st Centuries
The product of more than two years of critical investigations around climate science, creative practices and eco-politics, Visual Natures is a continuation of the journey started in 2021 with the data-driven installation Earth Bits—Sensing the Planetary and the public programme Climate Emergency > Emergence, curated by the maat Climate Collective chaired by T. J. Demos and including Susan Schuppli, Paulo Tavares and Molemo Moiloa. Together, they co-developed a year-long public programme which assembled diverse cultural practitioners working at the intersection between the experimental arts and political ecology.
Visual Natures is a research project that surveys political, social and cultural forms of collective agency which, over the course of the last one hundred years or so, demonstrate how humankind’s changing understanding of “nature”—philosophical, biological and economic—informs the ways in which we organise, sustain and govern our communities as an expanding planetary construct, both in concept and practice. With art direction by Beatrice Leanza, exhibition design by Brazilian architect Carla Juaçaba and installation and interaction design by Milan-based studio dotdotdot.
Visit maat’s website for full details about these projects and their public programmes.
