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.

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.

Yuri Dojc, a photographer renowned for his portraits of Jewish Holocaust survivors, and Katya Krausova, a veteran British filmmaker who, in 1997, won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film (with "Kolya") and is now also the exhibition's curator, show the memories of the inhabitants of Bardejov, a small Slovak seaside town. The exhibition and the accompanying documentary began its journey in 2009 and have already travelled to three continents, in the most diverse venues: from the Cambridge Manuscript Library to the United Nations building in New York, to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, followed by Berlin and Moscow. Currently, several pictures from the exhibition are already part of the permanent collection of the Library of Congress in Washington (USA).

BANKSY: Genius or Vandal? brings us closer to the controversial artistic world of one of the most influential creators in recent years, featuring more than 70 works organised into various thematic sections. The exhibition includes original works, sculptures, installations, videos and photographs. The works, from private collections and with the collaboration of Lilley Fine Art/Contemporary Art Gallery will be exhibited in Portugal again, for the first time in Porto. An impressive audio-visual installation especially created for this exhibition greets visitors on arrival, revealing clues about this mysterious artist, highlighting his most important pieces and framing his unusual career, fraught with controversy. Amongst the most widely recognised works in the show is the original silkscreen of the “Girl with Balloon” series, similar to the one recently destroyed by the artist in an unprecedented action at Sotheby’s, London auction house.

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

Spiritus –The best way to travel is to feel is an innovative multimedia show that goes beyond the walls of the Church of Clérigos, in Porto. This immersive experience explores music, light, energy and colour, creating an atmosphere of visual poetry, synchronicity and lightness that fills the entire architecture of the Church of Clérigos. Created by OCUBO and freely inspired by the poem “Afinal, a melhor maneira de viajar é sentir” by Álvaro de Campos, Spiritus awakens the imaginary, spirituality and mindfulness in each spectator.

The night tours to the Clérigos Tower are back. Visitors will be able to be dazzled by the privileged landscape of Porto until next October 16th. Tickets can be purchased at the entrance of the monument and the adult ticket price remains at 5€ per person. “Clérigos by Night” is already a programme of tradition and a hit, sought after by both local families and tourists from all over the world who visit the Invicta. This programme began in the summer of 2015, to fill the limited cultural offer available after 6 pm, which the city of Porto had at the time. For Father Manuel Fernando, President of the Institution, “it is a great pleasure to see the city regaining its visitors and to realise that various players have contributed with cultural offers of international interest and also outside the usual opening hours”.

“Serralves em Luz” is back for a second edition and transforms the entire Serralves Park into an impressive light exhibition, providing the night-time enjoyment of this magnificent space through a surprising experience. After the success of the first edition, mentioned in the British newspaper The Times as one of the 10 best exhibitions to visit in all of Europe, “Serralves em Luz” is back, with the creative direction of Nuno Maya and organised in conjunction with the Serralves team and with light designs by the OLAB Collective, Sophie Guyot, Tamar Frank and Tilen Sepič. Along a 3 km route, twenty-five light installations, using multiple sources, low energy consumption technologies and even plants recovered in the Park itself, provide a magical sensory experience, in an immersive environment that provides new perspectives of this remarkable space and beckons to discover its natural and architectural heritage. Nuno Maya's light designs, created specifically for this exhibition, combine various forms of light with different locations in the Park, awakening in the spectator different visual sensations and emotions, while international interventions focus on luminous and interactive sculptural pieces that enable, for the for the first time, an active role of the audience that can thus transform, through light, the natural landscapes of the spaces. From the workshop for children, designed by the exhibition’s creative director and held with the collaboration of the Serralves Environment Education Service, was also born a video mapping projection on the facade of Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira, created by 2nd year students of Escola Básica da Pasteleira do Porto. In parallel with this great open-air and night-time exhibition, there will be a programme of guided tours and photography workshops, which complements and enhances the experience of the different dimensions present: light, nature, art and architecture. Visit “Serralves em Luz” and enjoy a truly luminous evening.