Until 31 August 2021, visitors to the Clérigos Tower and Museum will be surprised by a photography exhibition with the theme “Só, Neste Porto Só!”, by Clara Ramalhão and with contributions by Paulo Ferreira (director of the film Lockdown Porto), portraying the lockdown experienced from March to May 2020. “With this exhibition, the Clérigos Brotherhood intends to show its national and international visitors what it was like to experience an empty Porto, without its people and without its visitors, but also to show a message of light and hope”, says Father Manuel Fernando, President of the Clérigos Brotherhood.
This exhibition at Palácio da Bolsa presents two iconic works from the early 1970s that expand the artist's research on linguistic signs beyond the field of painting. Caixa Branca [White Box] (1971) proposes to create, relying on chance and on the participation of the public, a new language. The work contains a low-tech system of lamps and switches through which the letters of the alphabet can be lit up or turned off, in a playful invention of new words and syntaxes. The work "A" grande [Capital “A”] (1970) is the only trace preserved and restored by Vieira of his first performance, entitled O Espírito da Letra [The Spirit of the Letter]. In this “action-spectacle” he presented a series of large-format letters that were later destroyed by him and a group of children. By breaking with the limits of two-dimensional painting, Vieira's letters took a corporeal form and created a physical confrontation with the spectators and with the agents of performative destruction. This action is permeated by an implicit critique of language as the support for discourse. These historic artworks are presented at Palácio da Bolsa as part of the national touring programme of the Serralves Collection, which aims to make the Foundation's collection accessible to diverse audiences from all regions of the country.
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.
"If someone were to ask me what the five most beautiful days of my life have been, that day with Giacometti's sculptures would be certainly in the top three". This is how Peter Lindbergh described the day he was invited to photograph Alberto Giacometti's art collection at the artist's Foundation in Paris. From the outcome of this encounter emerged a joint exhibition, of Giacometti's sculptures and Lindbergh's photographs. It is this exhibition that now arrives at MMIPO – Museu e Igreja da Misericórdia do Porto. So far, this joint exhibition has only been exhibited at the Giacometti Institute in Paris. It is an intimate dialogue between the work of Alberto Giacometti (1901 - 1966), one of the most acclaimed sculptors of the 20th century and the photography of Peter Lindbergh, which reveals a notable similarity in the way they represent reality. This initiative is also a tribute to the legendary fashion photographer who died prematurely in September 2019 and who was fully involved in the process of bringing the exhibition to Porto. The exhibition comprises more than 110 works, including bronze sculptures and drawings by Alberto Giacometti, as well as photographs by Peter Lindbergh. In an exclusive room, some of the most iconic portraits by the fashion photographer will be on display, including those featuring Naomi Campbell, Uma Thurman and Julianne Moore.
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.”
This exhibition, shown at the mezzanine of the Serralves Library, brings together works by Jorge Molder (Lisbon, 1947) selected from a wider set of works in the Serralves collection. The photographs presented belong to the “T. V.” (1995), “La Reine vous salue” (2001), “Tangram” (2004/08), “Call for Papers” (2013) and also “Zizi” (2013). Molder's work is known mainly for his black and white photographs, in which the artist photographs himself (only his face, full body and hands) usually wearing a dark suit and white shirt, an idea that is contradicted by his two latest series. References from literature, film, music or art history, as well as from the everyday, life and its uncertain and unpredictable nature, are crucial in his oeuvre, as they can constitute the point from which can derive and build something. In this sense, and because the exhibition takes place in the Library, the exhibition is complemented with bibliographic references important for the artist available for consultation, including some of his books and exhibition catalogues.
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.
Livraria Lello inaugurated an "unprecedented" project with Time magazine, which highlights authors awarded by the Swedish academy who were the cover of the North American magazine. The art installation "Livraria Lello X Time: What Makes a Nobel?", by Time's creative director, D.W. Pine, highlights authors who received the Nobel, but also others who "deserved front cover honours" of Time because of "their value ‘nobelizable’ of its literature". The installation is made up of 12 panels, which feature the covers of Time magazine, from Rudyard Kipling, one of the first Nobel laureates in Literature, to Toni Morrison, awarded by the Swedish Academy in 1993, as well as other authors who were featured on the cover, such as Virginia Woolf and William Shakespeare.
Ai Weiwei (Beijing, 1957) is a global citizen, artist, thinker and activist who uses various modes of investigation and production in his work, depending on the direction and outcome of the research he currently has in hands. From iconoclastic positions in regard to authority and history — which included the triptych Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995, and a series of photographs entitled Study of Perspective, (1995 - 2011), in which he shows the middle finger to symbols of power — his output has diversified to encompass architecture, public art and performance. In addition to concerns of form and protest, Ai Weiwei currently measures our existence according to the relation to economic, political, natural, and social forces, uniting craftsmanship with conceptual creativity. Universal symbols of humanity and community, such as bicycles, flowers or trees, as well as the perennial problems of borders and conflicts are reformulated and enhanced through installations, sculptures, films and photographs, while continuing to speak out publicly on issues he believes important. He is one of the most prominent cultural figures of his generation and an example of freedom of expression, both in China and internationally. The works on display — Iron Roots (2019) and Pequi Tree (2018 - 2020) — are part of a body of work that reflects Ai Weiwei's interest and concern with the environment and, more specifically, with the deforestation of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. The exhibition in Serralves was conceived specifically for the park and for the Museum's central room.