“Quando a Terra Voltar a Brilhar Verde para Ti” (When the Green of the Earth Will Glisten for You Anew), an exhibition that “steals” the title of a verse by the German poet Hölderlin, also used by the filmmakers, Jean Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet for their film about the death of the Greek philosopher Empedocles. Here one can admire the famous Júlio Dinis’ Herbarium in dialogue with drawings and sculptures by artists such as Rui Chafes, Ilda David, Teixeira de Pascoaes, Manuel Rosa and Lourdes Castro. There are also mural paintings by José Almeida Pereira, based on works by artists linked to the romantic imaginary, and an original sound composition by Jonathan Uliel Saldanha and Pedro Monteiro.

Modus Operandi took as its starting point a careful reading of the Serralves Collection since its inception, with the set of works acquired by the Secretary of State for Culture even before the Serralves Foundation and the Museum were created, to its most recent additions. From the outset, this Collection has had the ambition of including avant-garde artistic forms, experimentalist in nature and of an international scope, looking at the world from the Portuguese aesthetic and cultural specificity of the years that followed the 1974 Revolution. Also remarkable is the crossing and mixing of artistic disciplines such as plastic arts, music, performance and literature. This exhibition brings together a selection of works that reflect various transdisciplinary, experimental and conceptual approaches that demonstrate the attitudes, contexts and concerns of artistic output from the 1960s to the present day. The title comes from the homonymous work by the North American artist Joseph Kosuth, belonging to the Portuguese State Collection of Contemporary Art (Coleção de Arte Contemporânea do Estado-CACE) in storage in Serralves, which is presented in the exhibition. Modus Operandi points to different ways of doing, of operating, namely of making and thinking art. It is precisely in this sense that the presentation, for the first time, of a portfolio, also belonging to CACE, in which 30 international artists pay homage to Joseph Beuys show the importance of his legacy in the way of making art, of his belief that art can change the world and that everyone can be an “artist”.

Station 1 reveals the history of absence, rather than the history of presence. Fragments and further fragments are used to narrate moments that indicate the existence of the current and previous epochs. Materials from different periods coexist with audiovisual devices and different types of image, to show us how PortuCale - the city that gave Portugal its name - became Porto.

Mark Bradford (Los Angeles, 1961) is currently acknowledged as one of the names that best defined painting of the last two decades, by creating his own pictorial language to talk about universal themes, such as the distribution of power within societal structures and its impact on the individual or the relationship between art and community engagement. In his work, the social element is given through his choice of materials. Using everyday materials and tools found in hardware stores, Bradford created a unique artistic language. Often referred to as “social abstraction”, his work is rooted on the understanding that all materials and techniques are embedded with a meaning that precedes their artistic utility. His signature style developed out of his experimentation with endpapers, the small, translucent papers used in hairdressers, but he has since experimented with other types of paper, including maps, billboards, film posters, comic books and ‘merchant posters’ advertising predatory services in economically distressed neighbourhoods. Through this rigorously physical approach to the material presence of painting, Bradford has been addressing crucial issues of our time, such as the AIDS epidemic; the misrepresentation and fear of queer and homosexual identity; systemic racism in the United States; and more recently, the Covid-19 crisis.

Ever Archive: The Publications and Publication Projects of Hans-Ulrich Obrist. “Ever Archive: The Publications and Publication Projects of Hans Ulrich Obrist” is an exhibition devoted to the Chicago-based publication archive of curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, who is the Artistic Director at Serpentine Galleries in London. The exhibition comprises a series of modules that address the intertwining of documents and their stories: the people, events and institutions that all played a role in bringing them into being. The exhibition also questions, through metaphor and other representations, the different behaviours of an archive: its fragility and instability, its relationship to other archives, as well as its various historical gaps. A central component of the show is a series of vitrine exhibitions that examine not only the historic architecture of the vitrine and its relationship to the “Wunderkammer”, but also the conceptual possibilities that vitrines impose through their physical constraints. “Ever Archive” also includes a history of the archive itself - an archive of the archive - which documents how it has changed over time in relation to the context of technological tools and human knowledge.

This exhibition features works by Pedro Tudela (Viseu, 1962) belonging to the Serralves Collection, spanning nearly 30 years of work, from 1990 to 2019. Pedro Tudela studied Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto and started his career in the 1980s. Since then, he has proved to be an eclectic artist, working in different artistic disciplines and fields, such as painting, sculpture, performance, sound, multimedia, as well as set design and experimental electronic music. His earliest works from 1980 were paintings, but already in the early 1990s he introduced sound in his work, which happens for the first time in the exhibition “Mute… life” (Galeria Atlântica, Porto, 1992), from which a work is featured here. In that exhibition, sound was still autonomous from the visual works that made up the exhibition, acting as an enveloping soundtrack and aggregating the various elements on display. From then on, sound became more and more relevant, fully integrating the work, visually and conceptually, in the same way as drawing, painting or sculpture. Tudela works and incorporates the various disciplines without hierarchies or boundaries between them, precisely reflecting the permeability between languages ​​that becomes one of the main characteristics of his work. Sound gains prominence, is treated visually, often materialized in sculptures through the incorporation of the devices that generate it — loudspeakers, magnetic tapes, cables, speakers are plastic material in a dual aspect, visual and acoustic. Tudela's artistic practice is inseparable from human existence and the world, which has manifested itself in different ways throughout its trajectory, represented in this exhibition in a selection of nine works.

Christina Kubisch is one of today's most celebrated sound artists. After studying painting, flute, piano, musical composition and electronic music, she began, in the 1970s, to work with sound sculptures, installations and electroacoustic compositions that would establish her as a trailblazer artist in the field of Sound Art. In the late 1970s, Christina Kubisch began using the technique of electromagnetic induction in her installations, a device that allows the transmission of sounds between electrical cables and headphones with magnetic coils specially designed by the artist. This system, which Kubisch has been constantly improving both technically and artistically, has been the starting point for numerous sound installations carried out around the world since 1980. It brings together and intersects various aspects of Kubisch's work: a revelation and awareness of the flow of energy and sound that, in an age dominated by technology that surrounds us anytime, anywhere; the proposal of an aesthetic dimension to the sounds transported by electricity and electromagnetism, in compositions that are constituted either by the artist's choices or by the movement of the public, conscious and self-determined; the underlining of our condition as beings connected by much more than what is on the surface, namely by what is invisible and silent. The installation THE GREENHOUSE, 2017 (with a new version for Serralves in 2021), is an example of Kubisch's works that use electromagnetic induction. The public, equipped with headphones, is given access to the soundscape that emerges from the approximately 1,500 meters of suspended cables in the Museum's Contemporary Gallery. When moving in the space, the public will be able to mix the series of natural and electromagnetic sounds that circulate in them. Also in BRUNNENLIEDER [FOUNTAIN SONGS], 2009, natural sounds are fused - either from the Serralves Park where it is installed or from recordings - with musical quotations from vinyl records of Schubert's song “Ein Brunnen vor dem Tore”, (based on a traditional song with the same name), gathered under the sign and sound plasticity of water. SILENCE PROJECT, 2011 – ongoing, focuses on a line of research and artistic practice by Kubisch that addresses the material, conceptual and cultural questions of silence. Based on a collection of recordings of the words that mean “silence” in about seventy languages, the project is divided into two works: one made from the images of sonograms of these words (“Analyzing Silence”, 2011 – ongoing), and another (“Silent Exercises”, 2011 - ) includes a silent video projection where these images merge and a sound installation based on the spatialization of a composition of the recordings of words, which will impose itself on the silence in the tower of the Chapel of the Serralves Villa. In 2010, Christina Kubisch presented a version for the centre of Porto of her well-known “Electrical Walks”, as part of the Trama performing arts festival. Now in 2021, Kubisch will have her first exhibition in Portuguese territory, constituting an opportunity for a closer relationship with this fundamental artist and historical figure in contemporary music and art.

The partnership between Manoel de Oliveira and Agustina Bessa-Luís is one of the most intricate chapters in the already tangled history of film adaptations of literary texts. As all the books are a unique case as affinities and dissimilarities between literature and cinema are concerned and having given rise to unusual accomplishments, the intersections between the works of both authors are crucial for understanding the body of work of each one. Having started in 1981, with the adaptation of the novel “Fanny Owen” (1979) into the film “Francisca”, Oliveira's collaboration with Agustina continued until 2005, with “Espelho Mágico” (Magic Mirror), an adaptation of “A Alma dos Ricos” (2002). In between, there are eight other texts by the writer that inhabit the director's oeuvre, which includes three novels, two dialogues, a play, a short story and a speech read by Agustina herself. In order to think about these relations between literature and cinema, it was useful to bring to the exhibition a wide range of scientific and para-scientific, knowledge and other even more obscure ones, because only these can illuminate a field of ​​knowledge essentially made up of intuitions and paradoxes, inversions of meaning and perplexities. The clash between words and images, between novels and films, calls for other confrontations, which we tried to explore in the exhibition, and opens up an interstitial space, a place of the aesthetic and the symbolic, where all this ancient and modern knowledge is brought into play. The terms of this dialogue are probably the most fruitful partnership of Portuguese arts and letters in the last hundred years.

The Miró Collection, owned by the Portuguese State, on loan to the Municipality of Porto and deposited at the Serralves Foundation, comprises 85 artworks and includes paintings, sculptures, collages, drawings and tapestries by the renowned Catalan artist. The Collection spans six decades of Joan Miró's work, from 1924 to 1981, thus being an excellent introduction to his work and his main artistic concerns. The exhibition follows on from the conclusion of the works of the Serralves Villa’s restoration and adaptation project, by the architect Álvaro Siza, who had the support of the Porto City Council, under the terms of the protocol that defines the conditions for depositing the Miró Collection in Serralves. Joan Miró (1893-1983), one of the great “form-givers” of the 20th century, was simultaneously an aesthetic “assassin” who challenged the traditional limits of the medium in which he worked. In his art, the different practices dialogue with each other, crossing the mediums: painting communicates with drawing; sculpture seduces woven objects; and collages, always conjugations of disparate entities, function as a major principle or matrix for exploring the depths of reality. This exhibition does not follow a chronological or linear format: the works are thematically aggregated, trying to give a holistic view of the artist's career. The various rooms address different aspects of his art: the development of a sign language; the artist's encounter with abstract painting that was done in Europe and America; his interest in the process and the expressive gesture; its complex responses to the social drama of the 1930s; the innovative approach to collage; the impact of Southwest Asian aesthetics on his drawing practice; and, above all, his incessant curiosity about the nature of materials.

From Tuesday to Friday, at 12:30PM, the monitors of the Museu da Cidade guide tours lasting 30 minutes, upon purchase of a ticket.

"Porto Legends: The Underground Experience" is an audiovisual event that will introduce ten legends related to the history of Porto. The show will be screened at Furnas (underground) of Alfândega do Porto. The latest creation by the Portuguese studio OCUBO, specialist in video mapping projects, debuts at Furnas of Alfândega do Porto. Through an immersive experience, the show will reveal ten legends related to the history of Porto, inspired by the book of historian Joel Cleto, "As Lendas do Porto". The Porto Legends - The Underground Experience project had 70 actors, 120 costumes and 30 video artists, using 50 high definition video projectors, strategically installed on the walls, floors, ceilings, columns and arches of Furnas of Alfândega do Porto. The ten legends that make up the show are narrated by Pedro Abrunhosa, in the Portuguese version, and the award-winning British actor Jeremy Irons, in the English version. Over 45 minutes, legends will be told such as Pedro Cem, Zé do Telhado, Baron Forrester, the famous Porto-style tripes, the mystery of Serra do Pilar’s Treasure; the violent siege of Porto, the 1755 earthquake and the ghost of São Bento Train Station. The public is invited to move about freely during the show, in an unprecedented 360º worldwide experience. Porto.CARD - NOT TO BE MISSED! Enjoy Porto.CARD and have discounts on tickets: Full ticket: 2€ discount / Pack of Two exhibitions: 3€ discount Reduced ticket: 1€ discount /Pack of Two exhibitions: 1.50€ discount

What is the life expectancy of a plastic bag from crude polyethylene until it is thrown away? For how long is it actually in used? Not long at all, compared to the length of time it will then stray across the planet, blown and buffeted by the wind. It is then that its real life begins, its autonomous life. Little anonymous plastic bag among the countless little plastic bags on its way to a rot-proof eternity. Let's hope there is a strong wind to help it overcome any obstacles, to carry it across oceans and mountains, to find new possibilities and try out different lives. What if we humans were so firmly anchored to the ground, what if we too could escape the pull of gravity and fly with the wind, free at last, carried by the arbitrary waltz of the air? What if we were unconsciously feeding our thirst to discover unknown territories, to fight uncertain battles to make each of our members part of us, autonomous and uncontrollable. Upright or upside down, free up those hands, be the object of all motion and movement. Just a sound and the air’s caress. This performance piece uses a simple turbine in order to create a whirlwind. The little plastic bags’ characters draw trajectories in space, responding to the movement of the air, which, in turn, is controlled by the protagonist. – Phia Menard