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.

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.

What do Lena D’Água, Ana Deus, Anabela Duarte, Manuela Azevedo or Xana have in common? All of them have a place in Portuguese rock history and are a part of a group of 15 women whose musical careers are going to be celebrated in the exhibition, and in a series of side events that are going to take place in the next 6 months. Symbolically inaugurated on March 8th, International Women’s Day, in Casa Comum (Rectory) of the University of Porto, and with free admission. It will be open until 30 September 2022. Organised by Casa Comum and the Institute of Sociology of the University of Porto, this unprecedented exhibition is born with the aim of paying tribute to “relevant women in Portuguese rock”, from post-25 April period until today. To do so, it proposes to tell their stories through records, cassettes, clothes, props, scribbles of lyrics, staves, drumsticks, musical instruments, among other objects that marked their respective careers.

METAMORFOSES focuses on the profusion and the process of integration of the imaginary and the vegetal, mineral and animal themes in a romantic domestic space, bringing to the halls of the house of Quinta da Macieirinha several pieces, some previously exhibited in the former Romantic Museum and other spaces of Museu da Cidade, others never exhibited, showing the unquestionable quality and diversity of the municipal collections. This exhibition also marks the beginning of the evocation of the centenary of the death of Porto artist, Aurélia de Souza, a key moment of the 2022/2023 programme. The celebrated self-portrait of the artist as “Santo António” (Saint Anthony), made around 1902, will be part of the new collection that brings together paintings, furniture, tapestries and textiles, ceramics, crockery and silverware, as well as other surprising sections of the collection, such as sets of fans, cut-out papers and malacology.

Leonilson was one of the major exponents of a generation of Brazilian artists known as “Geração 80” (80s Generation). After the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship in the mid-1980s, this group of artists celebrated their newly acquired freedom with a gestural, colourful, and expressive style of painting. While American Pop Art appropriated the symbols of a highly industrialized society in the 1980s, the Geração 80s’ art was firmly critical of society. Born in 1957, Leonilson studied art in São Paulo from 1978 to 1981. Apart from Eva Hesse and Blinky Palermo, both of whom he met during his travels in Europe, his first major influence was the Italian transavanguardia movement. Formed in the late 1970s, transavanguardia turned to figuration, ancient mythology, and expressive use of colour. Similarly, Leonilson’s paintings and drawings from this period show an eclectic subjectivism and an emblematic visual language. An exhibition of textiles produced by the Shakers, a Christian American sect, marked a key moment in the artist’s early career. The Shakers’ embroidered maps influenced him greatly and inspired him to embrace textiles as an artistic medium. When Leonilson was diagnosed with AIDS in 1991, his visual language changed significantly: between 1991 and 1993, his work, which resembled a diary, revealed his deteriorating health and showed his concern with death. Towards the end of his life, he was only able to work with needle, thread, and fabric. In this period, language and abstraction, as well as religious, visual and formal language played an important role in Leonilson’s work. The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art is pleased to present the first major retrospective of the work of the Brazilian artist Leonilson in Portugal. The exhibition presents a selection of over 250 works that encompass a broad range of mediums and styles, from the artist’s early paintings to the introspective embroidery of Leonilson’s last years, providing an overview of his entire oeuvre.

Artist and electro-acoustic composer Tarek Atoui works on large-scale compositions that stem from anthropological, ethnological, musicological, and technical research. His exhibitions weave installations, performances, and educations, in processes that move away from the conventional notion of performance, both for the performer and the audience, and that suggest forms of visual, aural, tactile, and somatic experience of sound. This first exhibition in Portugal is part of the project I/E, ongoing since 2015, in which Atoui captures the sounds of port cities — Athens, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Beirut or Porto - by recording their harbours’ industrial, human, and ecological activities. Together with artist/recordist Eric La Casa, they listen to sound below the surface of the sea or within materials such as metal, stone, and wood. On Waters’ Witness, the audio recordings of the seaports of Athens, Abu Dhabi and Porto are played through materials chosen in every location — marble stones from Athens, steel beams from Abu Dhabi, and wooden structures housing compost, worms and organic material specifically produced for the Serralves presentation. The work with organic decomposing matter takes Waters’ Witness in a new direction: an acoustic ecology that receives and perpetuates residual sounds through the audible frontiers of a world in flux. This unique soundscape extends from the museum’s central room to the park in the shape of sound constellations, platforms and systems activated through the entire period of the exhibition in scheduled performances, collaborative and educational workshops.

“Ajax et plures” presents a set of works by João Paulo Feliciano from the 1990s and 2000s belonging to the Serralves collection and a never-seen-before work conceived for the campus of Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Porto. The works presented are representative of different moments in the artist’s career, revealing the continuities and ruptures that have marked his artistic practice over the last thirty years. If the works of the 1990s revolve around the world of rock music and urban reality, the works of 2004 and 2021 show an interest in exploring perceptual phenomena and allow us to distinguish a turning point in the relationship (of fascination/rejection) with technology. There is a constant questioning of the material and linguistic mediums that the artist uses as a way of rethinking our relationship with the world, questioning assumptions of traditional artistic genres in the light of different aspects of folk culture. His ironic and provocative attitude, his desire to involve the spectator in the work’s meaning and, above all, his insatiable appetite for experimentation reveals to be transversal to João Paulo Feliciano’s diverse body of work. The works are presented in different spaces of the UCP – Porto campus, at the Edifício das Artes and the Edifício de Restauro.

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

The role of women, which for centuries was limited to the home or to monastic seclusion, took on a new prominence in the late 19th century and early 20th century when many paradigms were called into question, namely the emancipation of women and their involvement in various fields and activities of social life. The political and social changes that followed the Second World War allowed profound transformations, namely the rejection of the stereotype of women as weak, passive and dependent beings. From the end of the 1970s, women's art - and women photographers in particular - began to be interpreted and valued, not only as an expression of uniqueness but also as a tool for deconstructing the "male gaze". In order to show this evolution, we highlight the social concerns of Doris Ulmann who portrayed African American workers in the plantations of southern USA or Edith Tudor Hart who, as a disciple of Bahaus, aimed to give art back a social mission. With World War II, Margaret Bourke-White appears as the first female war correspondent, while Sabine Weiss Weber, in the 1950s, was considered the Grand Lady of humanist photography. In 1960, Vieira da Silva was portrayed by the Russian Ida Kar, who never managed to integrate into the increasingly commercial photographic environment of the 1960s. At the end of the century the range of women's photography widened: in the 1990s, we had Cristina Garcia Rodero's photographic record of Catholic gypsies, while, at the same time, the theatricality of the pictures by the poet-photographer Flor Garduño emerged. In Portugal, Helena Almeida, one of the most prominent visual artists of the second half of the twentieth century, created a body of work that crosses disciplinary boundaries and questions the relationships between body, work and space. This exhibition thus aims to pay tribute to the female photographers represented in the National Photography Collection (Coleção Nacional de Fotografia - Portugal), whose solo works have contributed to the excellence of photographic narrative and have broken with the preconceived concepts of a male-dominated profession.

Banned from liturgy by the Council of Trent and only readmitted in 1727, the hymn “Stabat Mater Dolorosa” is based on the perspective of Mary, a mother who watches helplessly as her son experiences the last hours of his life. Despite the ban, the depth and strength of the text appealed to several generations of composers. Accompanied by Anna Dennis and Owen Willets, both widely praised in the universe of early music, Orquestra Barroca shows us the visions of the French Marc-Antoine Charpentier and the Italian Alessandro Scarlatti on the poignant and dramatic text, in what will certainly be one of the most emotional moments of the season. The concert begins with the music of Zelenka, a Bohemian Baroque composer influenced precisely by the French and Italian styles.