The title of the exhibition marking the centenary of Agustina Bessa-Luís (1922–2019) evokes the name of a film by the director with whom the writer maintained a regular and fruitful collaboration: “Um Filme Falado” [A Talking Picture] (2003) by Manoel de Oliveira. The starting point of the exhibition were the books “Aforismos” (1988), “Contemplação Carinhosa da Angústia” (2000), “Dicionário Imperfeito” (book published in 2008 that brings together excerpts from texts arranged in alphabetical order) and “Ensaios e Artigos” (1951–2007) (2017), which cover a wide range of subjects, themes and personalities. While reading these volumes – which both in terms of form and content can be understood as true revelations of Agustina's world – some of the writer's key ideas were identified. These themes are the entries for this “dictionary-exhibition”, each creating a dialogue with works from the Serralves Collection, by Portuguese and foreign artists, some of whom were her contemporaries. The aim is to create unexpected synapses, reverberations, between selected pieces and words, expanding their respective meanings and possible interpretations. The exhibition, which is to be read as much as to be seen, is presented as a three-dimensional book.

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.

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.

This exhibition, the artist's first solo show in Portugal, is centred around her most recent film – “Eu sou uma arara” [I am a macaw] (2022) – which will have its first ever premiere in Serralves. Made in collaboration with filmmaker Mariana Lacerda, this medium-length film is a critical reflection on the impact of deforestation in the Amazon upon its indigenous peoples at a time of political and social tension. This work is also the result of a long period of research and a series of actions in São Paulo where dozens of figures inspired by Brazilian fauna and flora were paraded through the city's streets, like a dense and powerful forest. Heir to the historical legacy of the post-war avant-garde movements, from neo-concrete to tropicália, Rivane Neuenschwander (b. 1967) is one of the most renowned names in Brazilian contemporary art. In her work, the artist combines different media and mediums to build a unique visual repertoire that explores narratives on a wide range of themes, including language and time, popular culture and literature, psychoanalysis and art, nature and society, politics and philosophy, fear and desire. One of her most iconic works, “Eu desejo o seu desejo” [I wish your wish] (2003), a collection of wishes reminiscent of the wish ribbons/bracelets of Senhor do Bonfim, will be placed in the Chapel of Serralves Villa.

Cindy Sherman: Metamorphosis presents a series of works that span the artist's career from her earliest work to her most recent works. The exhibition was organized in dialogue with the artist and in partnership with The Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles, an institution that has collected in depth Cindy Sherman's work for over thirty years. Mainly known for photographs in which she portrays herself as her own model, embodying the role of female media-influenced stereotypes in a wide range of personas and environments, Cindy Sherman shoots alone in her studio, serving as artistic director, photographer, makeup artist, hairdresser and subject. The portrait practice she began decades ago is responsible for some of the most striking and influential images in contemporary art. For this ambitious presentation in Serralves, the museum's galleries will undergo a radical transformation, creating a theatrical set to host the storyboard that the artist's photographs make up. The exhibition will also include new work, especially created for the Serralves Museum: a large photographic mural, which will give the exhibition an additional uniqueness. Generally, the artist does not give titles to her works, trying to avoid preconceived interpretations or pre-interpretations that could influence the viewer, preferring to leave the construction of the stories to the discretion of each person. The images are, however, grouped in series and numbered and explore various themes and techniques, thus reinforcing the differentiation and classification: Untitled Film Still (1983-1984), Fashion (1983-84), Bus Rider (1976-2000), The Fairy Tales (1985), The Disasters (1986-89), The Historical Portraits (1988-90) , Sex Pictures (1992), Horror and Surrealistic Pictures (1994), Masks (1995), Broken Dolls (1999), The Hollywood/Hampton Ladies Portraits (2000), The Clowns (2003-05), Society (2008). In the exhibition in Serralves, these series are presented with no chronological order, but rather building a narrative. In Sherman's works, individual compositions and narratives refer to a complete and complex repertoire of female identities: but while the early works are full of visible emotions, in the later photographs the emotions are gradually excluded. The works are not self-portraits, but representations perfected by the distance from the camera or lens that captures them or, as Rosalind Krauss said, they are “a copy without actually having an original”. In the late 1980s, Sherman felt the need to suppress her presence and created unreal and grotesque images, accident scenes, made up of supernatural and terrifying characters who embodied irrational fears and nightmares and created macabre and repulsive settings. Gradually, the artist's body is replaced by fake breasts, human excrescences, bodily fluids, sexual debris, medical prostheses, which later gave rise to Sex Pictures (1992), one of her most daring series, in which Sherman arranges mannequins into pseudo-pornographic tableaux, deliberately un-erotic that challenge the porn industry standards. The artist's return to the centre of the image took place around 2000 with the series Head Shots, where she features a series of studio portraits, or the disturbing series Clowns (2003-05) and, later, images of elderly women. If the fake or artificial body parts force the viewer to confront the staged aspect of the work, the tragic and vulgar appearance of the characters compels him to feel a certain empathy and respect for them. On the other hand, there is an evident change in the positioning of the camera, in the alteration of the sets, in the saturation and overlapping of props and extraneous elements in the composition, as well as the size of the print. Later, in the Society series (2008), Sherman continues her exploration into distorted ideals of beauty, self-image and aging in a society obsessed with youth and status through characters set in sumptuous backgrounds and presenting these photographs in ornate frames. Sherman goes from analogue to digital and, like her characters, she experiments with various possibilities: truly natural settings in her first images, film techniques such as “rear projection”, studio photography (the place where she has greater control over the image construction), the cyclorama and finally construction images on digital backgrounds. Although her work is generally classified by critics and theorists as being associated with feminism, violence and voyeurism and focusing on representation, the artist herself tends to avoid this theoretical instrumentalization and such associations. When building a character, Sherman does not have a specific person in mind but a genre, and the complexity of the narrative is shaped in the specificity of the relationship between the setting and the character.

With a reflective and singular career, Vera Mota (Porto, 1982) has been developing her work around the politics of the body, promoting and weighting its participation as a generative methodology and axis for conceptual formulations. Resorting mainly to sculpture, drawing and performance, and thus taking advantage of the breadth and permeability that these disciplines offer, her artistic practice involves a strong material component. In the work of Vera Mota, performance emerges as a means of production, composition or even staging, in a process where the body as the almost always indispensable agent, imprinting its gestures and circulations. The artist pays special attention to the economy of presence, effort and action, the artist proposes successive exercises of repositioning of the body, sometimes subjecting it to processes of almost complete erosion of its characteristics. Assuming a sculptural animism and claiming other perspectives of the body and materiality, Vera Mota reassesses modes of representation, proposing processes and strategies of disqualification, transfer or transfiguration of forms, status or functions, among bodies or the parts that compose them. DISEMBODIED is the artist's first exhibition in a museum - as if from the hands to the head - proposes a permanent and tense dialogue between drawing and sculpture, in which the spectators find themselves involved.

“Who tells a tale adds a tail’” is a proverb used to indicate that a story is added to with each telling, i.e., people add their own details to their account of the very same event or fact. “Story telling” is one of the expressions that best define the oeuvre of artist Paula Rego (Lisbon, 1935 – London, 2022); “adding tails”, which all readers and viewers do, is the most accurate expression that define the visitors of exhibitions. Paula Rego was one of the artists who obtained the most recognition in the country where she was born and raised (Portugal) as well as in England, where she studied and lived until her death, and worldwide. The readings of her work underlined above all the relationship between her painting, drawings and prints with folk and traditional tales (many of them Portuguese in origin), with literature (including for children) and with her autobiography (especially her childhood), as well as on her contribution to a constant questioning and redefinition of women’s role in society. Held in the same year when Paula Rego has passed away, this exhibition, showcases a remarkable amount of her works in the Serralves Collection – including the impressive polyptych Possessão [Possession] (2004) – is an opportunity to once again admire her work.