Casa do Design launches an online programme with suggestions for activities to do at home with the little ones. Design at Home is the name of one of the online programmes of Casa do Design, with suggestions for educational activities to do with the little ones. The proposals are created based on the archive of past exhibitions presented at Casa do Design in recent years.

Is that the Polar Star that you see?… Why is it below Ursa Major?… “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, the Rolling Stones and Nuno Cardoso tell us, who chose this song as a kind of synthesis of his staging of Bella Figura by Yasmina Reza. On a spring night, five characters cross paths in a restaurant car park. The promise of a romantic dinner and a birthday party turns into an “evening of nerves”, fuelled by hypocrisy and lies. The art of conversation by the French playwright, where the comic and the fierce, the ridiculous and the grotesque live side by side, leads to a gradual stripping of these aimless characters, which Nuno Cardoso decides to assume on stage, stressing the loneliness and fragility of the bodies. Bella Figura was his last staging together with Ao Cabo Teatro, before assuming the artistic direction of Teatro Nacional São João. In late 2019, in a house’s production, TNSJ took this play to Almada, Madrid, and Mindelo (Festival Mindelact) and Praia, in Cape Verde. We now take it to our virtual room, in a video recording available on demand, until February 21st, directed by Fábio Coelho.

This fair started spontaneously at Praça da Batalha where handmade products (costume jewellery, wallets, among others) were sold. In the 90's the Porto City Hall regulated this activity, though the creation of Batalha Handcraft Fair.

This big exhibition dedicated to the oeuvre by Louise Bourgeois (Paris, 1911, New York, 2010) spans seven decades, showing works made by the artist between the late 1940s and 2010. Visited and revisited in countless exhibitions held over the past decades in various museum spaces around the world, Louise Bourgeois’ vast and unique body of work deals with themes indelibly associated with experiences and traumatic events of her childhood - family, sexuality, body, death and the unconscious - which the artist treated and exorcised through her art. This exhibition is organised by the Serralves Foundation - Museum of Contemporary Art and the Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland, USA, in collaboration with The Easton Foundation, New York, and co-produced with the Voorlinden Museum & Gardens, Wassenaar, Netherlands. To Unravel a Torment is curated by Emily Wei Rales, Director and co-founder of the Glenstone Museum. At Serralves, the exhibition was organised by Philippe Vergne, Director of the Museum, with Paula Fernandes, Curator. This exhibition was generously supported by Hauser & Wirth Gallery.

R. H. Quaytman employs mechanical reproduction techniques and conceptual art traditions to create closed series of works divided into chapters. Subsequent parts are numbered to mark the passage of time and gradually completing life and artistic project. The artist treats all exhibitions and paintings presented as one creative undertaking. R. H. Quaytman approaches painting as if it were poetry: when reading a poem, one notices specific words, we realise that each word has a resonance. Quaytman's paintings, organised into chapters structured like a book, have grammar, syntax and vocabulary. While the work is delimited by a rigid structure on a material level - they appear only in bevelled plywood panels in eight predetermined sizes derived from the golden ratio - the open-ended content creates permutations that result in an endless archive. Quaytman's practice engages three distinct stylistic modes: silkscreen based on photographs, optical patterns such as moiré and scintillating grids, and small hand-painted oil works. Quaytman's work, presented for the first time in Portugal, points to the new possibilities of today's painting. What is a painting, an icon? What are the means of painting in a culture saturated by visual stimulation, from photography to the digital forest of signs? Is painting still a relevant medium to share our story? The exhibition is co-organised by Muzeum Sztuki in Lódz, Poland, and by Fundação de Serralves – Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto. Curated by Jaroslaw Suchan

This is the first exhibition in Portugal by Korakrit Arunanondchai (Thailand, 1986), an artist who works in the fields of video, performance, sculpture and installation and who interacts between two cultures: born and raised in Asia he moved to the US in 2009 to study art and currently lives between New York and Bangkok. Arunanondchai's work explores and brings together themes such as Eastern religion and mythology, environment, ecology, music, geopolitics and technological development, contrasting Asian spirituality with Western pragmatism. Arunanondchai reflects on contemporary life and the human condition in the era of technology, speculating on the consequences of the Anthropocene, a recently definition that sees the effect of human activity as the main environmental force on the planet, capable of altering its geological composition. In his practice, the artist uses autobiographical events and experiences. Friends and family participate and are somehow involved in several of his works. No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5 (2019) is an installation made in partnership with the artist Alex Gvojic (U.S., 1984), a friend with whom he has been working for several years. Boychild, an artist linked to performance and dance who has regularly collaborated with Korakrit Arunanondchai, is also featured in this piece. No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5 envelops visitors in a mysterious and nocturnal environment in which a triple video projection is combined with laser rays emitted by a sculpture reminiscent of a lying human figure. The earth that covers the floor and the presence of natural materials (seashells, twigs) suggest a pre or post, historical environment. No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5 comprises a wide range of images and sounds, o generate an excessive, enveloping and disturbing atmosphere. The videos mix original footage - such as that captured by a drone of the Ramasum Camp radio station, a symbol of Thailand's recent history as an ally of the USA during the Vietnam War and now transformed into a tourist destination - and other pre-existing ones, such as television broadcast of of the rescue of 12 boys and their football coach who were trapped in a cave in Thailand in 2018. This work was initially commissioned by the Center d’Art Contemporain Genève for the 2018 Biennale of Moving Image and presented at the Venice Biennale in 2019.

Specifically conceived for the Contemporary Gallery, Hugo Canoilas' first exhibition (Lisbon, 1977) at the Serralves Museum is both a confirmation and expansion some core concerns in his practice: a speculative approach to the relationship between art and reality (social and political events), a questioning of the characteristics and boundaries of painting, and the emphasis given to collaborative work. With a background in painting, Canoilas has been examining the place of this artistic medium, how it is perceived both by museum visitors and passers-by (the artist is known for public space interventions which are never advertised as works of art). In the case of this exhibition at Serralves, Canoilas dispensed with the place where paintings are most expected to be found - the gallery walls - and decides to intervene on the floor, skirting board and ceiling of the Contemporary Gallery - spaces neglected by most painting exhibitions. On the floor there are three coloured glass pieces that represent jellyfish. Made in Marinha Grande, these jellyfish - possible symbols of climate warming, but also of such ideas as formlessness and metamorphosis on which several works by Hugo Canoilas are based – are meant to be stepped on by visitors. The main role given to the floor is confirmed by the skirting board-painting (a light box, featuring a painting on linen stretched like a canvas, delimiting the space of the exhibition), in which the artist draws attention to an architectural element that is as common as it is unnoticed. On the gallery ceiling, Hugo Canoilas will create a gestural painting that, like his most recent abstract paintings, is based on images of the seabed’s flora and fauna. It should be noted that the painting also functions as a lightbox that creates an aura in the room, affecting the perception of the jellyfish. Jellyfish are fascinating animals that, throughout their unusual life cycles undergo various metamorphoses and reproduce cells in unusual ways. His observation, which witnesses dramatic variations in configuration, defies all notions of stability and all ideas on the relationship between the parts and the whole. Just like this exhibition by Hugo Canoilas, comprised of three distinct elements - floor, skirting board and ceiling - that influence one another (in cooperation, symbiosis, competition, predation and parasitism) and which is an embodiment of an artistic practice that does not crystallize in a form, but which constantly question themselves about its own limits, functions and assumptions.

The more than one hundred photographs on display in the Manoel de Oliveira Fotógrafo exhibition are one of the big surprises that the director’s personal archive, entirely deposited in Serralves, had been holding. Produced between the late 1930s and the mid-1950s, these images, stored for several decades and mostly never-before-seen, reveal an unknown facet of Oliveira and open new perspectives on how his filmmaking developed. Manoel de Oliveira's passage through the static image is a decisive stage in his career as a filmmaker. In dialogue with both pictorialism, constructivism and Bauhaus' experiments, his photographs are halfway between exploring the classical values of composition and the modernist spirit running through the entire first phase of his film work. Used mostly artistically, photography is for the director an instrument of formal research and experimentation, another way of questioning, often in direct relationship with films, to building his own visual language. These images that are now on view, certainly add a new chapter to the history of Portuguese photography of the 1940s. But they are also a precious instrument to better understand the way Manoel de Oliveira took on, during a period of ten years, the direction of photography of his own films, as well as to contextualize, from a broader perspective, the strict composition that, in general, featured in all his films. Looking at these images, it will not be of much interest to know where the photographer begins and where the filmmaker ends, nor to define, with precision, the extent to which the first one may have sometimes taken the place of the second one. What is important, is to question how this coexistence between two ways of seeing and thinking is embodied in Manoel de Oliveira's work. Curated by António Preto, Director of Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira. All the photographs on display belong to the Manoel de Oliveira Collection, Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira - Fundação de Serralves, Porto.

This will be the first exhibition in Portugal of celebrated Indian artist Nalini Malani (Karachi, Undivided India, 1946). Widely known for her paintings and drawings, the exhibition in Serralves shows an equally significant side of her work, but with which audiences are perhaps less familiar, featuring exclusively her animations produced between the late 1960s and the present day. It was at the end of the 1960s, in an Indian art scene dominated by men, that Nalini Malani emerged as a provocative and feminist voice, equally pioneer in working with artistic media such as experimental cinema, video and installation. In addition to giving women a voice, the artist has always stood out as an artist concerned with social issues, giving prominence to marginalized people through visual stories (animations, in particular) that explore themes such as feminism, violence, racial tension and post-colonialist legacies. The animations brought together at the exhibition in Serralves, made between 1969 and 2020, were grouped under the sign of Utopia (this is, in fact, the title of the oldest work featured here), relating, on the one hand, to the utopian feeling that followed India’s independence and, on the other hand, the disillusionment with the path country had taken, governed by rules dictated by religious orthodoxy. In any case, Malani's work transcends national traumas to deal with globally social injustice. This is the case of the large immersive installation that closes the exhibition, which consists of nine video projections of animations and phrases. Can You Hear Me? although it was based on a violent story that took place in India involving the violent death of a child is an ode to all of those who have no voice. Produced between 2017 and 2020, the installation consists of animations in which images by the artist overlap and fragments of quotes of influential writers such as Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Bertolt Brecht, Veena Das, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Milan Kundera, George Orwell and Wislawa Szymborska. According to the artist, Can You Hear Me? corresponds to the type of animation that she has been focusing on recently, to what she calls notebooks, and which are digitally created on an iPad. Malani has already stated: “When I see or read something that captures my imagination, I have a need to react with a drawing or drawings in motion. Not exactly in its mimetic form but more like a 'Memory Emotion'. I feel like a woman with thoughts and fantasies shooting from the head. Each of them may contain different ideas and may not feel like it is from the same person. Each of these voices in my head needs therefore a different penmanship.”

Roni Horn (New York, 1955) is an American artist who lives between New York and Reykjavik, Iceland. From a very young age she developed a passion for literature and philosophy, before her interest in the visual arts, and led her to see her library as a core engine for herself and her work. The practice of drawing is key and crucial in her oeuvre, and she has also been using other media, such as sculpture, photography and artist’s books. Travelling and immersing in the landscape - especially that of Iceland - are essential in her work, which explores themes such as weather and ecology, along with memory, identity and change. The representation of the outside world is used as an artifice or metaphor to reach an inner and mental space. These eight photographs of the River Thames belong to a series of 80 pictures that Serralves exhibited in her solo exhibition in 2001 and which were acquired at the time for the Collection. In Some Thames (2000-2001), Horn captures moments of the Thames’ flowing surface, getting a set of images that are seemingly abstract and very similar to each other. In fact, they are realistic images and there are infinite differences between them, although imperceptible at first glance. On the one hand, this approach points directly to the experience and perception that each one of us has of the passage of time. On the other hand, water, often represented or evoked in the artist's work, is an allusion to life, the body, sexuality, but also death. As the literature tells us - namely Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad - in the dark waters of the Thames, the bodies of many of those who had violent deaths were thrown, as were many who committed suicide in these waters.

Dara Birnbaum (New York, 1946) is an American artist who has stood out since the 1970s with her video works. At that time, television had a huge influence in people's lives, it was the main and most influential source of information in society, now amplified by the internet. Birnbaum critically analyses the television universe, frequently using TV broadcast images, by interrupting them, repeating them and editing them. From the 1990s onwards, she began to create large-scale video installations, consisting of several television screens. Specially commissioned for Documenta IX in Kassel, Transmission Tower: Sentinel (1992) analyses the influence of television on American politics, in this case regarding the First Gulf War, which began in 1991. Eight video monitors, mounted on sections of a transmission tower, form a line that follows the trajectory of a bomb dropped from a cargo plane. Images of George Bush addressing the 1988 National Republican Congress are broadcast on each monitor. At the same time, images of poet Allen Ginsberg reading his anti-war poem Hum Bom!, written during the Vietnam War and rewritten for the Golf War, at a 1988 National Student Convention, stream across the monitor pole.

The Mercado da Ribeira consists of 10 stores, and was created after the renovation of the old market. Food products in its traditional form, tourist products and restaurants. Location: Cais da Ribeira (near the north pillar of Luiz I Bridge).

Reenvisioning the Future of the Planet in the 21st Century The notion of the Anthropocene spilled out from the geophysical sciences to the humanities, social sciences, arts, and the media, triggering a vast global debate about the future of human life on the planet. In the “age of humans”, humans have become one of the most potent geophysical forces in the planet and our activities are leading us to increasing environmental uncertainties. If the world has ever had the illusion of stability, it is now facing the prospect of endless problems. But the Anthropocene is not just about a runaway world of environmental doom; it is about overcoming disaster and catastrophe and creating new visions of hope and justice. The new challenges of climate change, species extinction, and sea levels rise compel a reenvisioning of humanity's place in the world, and an urgent rethinking of the dominant forces that threaten the planet's ecological balance. Using the term Anthropocene to refer to this new age of growing anthropogenic uncertainties has opened up a whole new field of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary conversations about the relationship of human beings with the environment in the 21st century, but it has also generated a monolithic understanding of the Anthropocene as a unified human experience. This Anthropocene framework around a universalizing species paradigm creates a homogenizing effect. And yet, not all humans are equally involved in the forces driving contemporary environmental crises, and not all humans are equally invited into the conceptual spaces where these disasters are theorised or where responses to these disasters are formulated. Pluralizing the Anthropocene will feature anthropological reflections by major figures in the humanities and contemporary sciences committed to a more plural view of the debates around the Anthropocene and the major issues of resilience, adaptation and the struggle for environmental justice. The access link will be sent after the registration period has ended.

The sharing of culture, the promotion and dissemination of science and the relationship with nature, in all its areas, represent a unique mechanism with real impact on our lives and the way we see ourselves in the world. Serralves lives to create multiple relationships with art forms, with nature and with people, be they, with musicians, artists, dancers, architects, filmmakers, landscapers, researchers, students, thinkers, teachers, partners, founders, patrons, people. With its entire audience. The current situation requires that our responsibility is expressed in a new format and that we are present. So, it is with great pleasure that the Serralves Foundation, when (re)inventing itself, offers a series of online talks, entitled #ConversasComSerralves, whose purpose is to bring us even closer, by inviting the audiences to participate in unique moments to exchange artistic, environmental, scientific and creative experiences. An exclusive programme that involves all of Serralves' areas of activity - plastic arts, architecture, cinema, performance arts, the environment, science, landscape, architecture and the most comprehensive reflection on different topics important to the society and its future. These sessions take place online, always at 6 pm, with free participation and mandatory registration.