Noble Nature hates the monsterCalled “loan request” by writer Luiz Pacheco (1925-2008), the exhibition brings together 13 pieces in video installation/video sculptures, most created in the last 15 years, according to the exhibition’s curator, Bruno Marchand.
“In these pieces, Alexandre Estrela links the idea of beauty in nature to the idea of the monster, not as a theme, but as a horizon, integrating visual and sound references,” described the head of visual arts programming. in Culturagest.
The exhibition takes place almost a year after the presentation of the audiovisual installation flat hoods At the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the first individual exhibition of a Portuguese artist was held in that North American institution, highlighted Bruno Marchand.
In the gallery rooms, Estrela’s pieces carry allusions to natural phenomena, animals and the mineral world, as well as human behavior, the result of recent developments in his research.
The exhibition opens with Hadthe most recent piece of the 13, created this year, a computer-generated video projection on an etched aluminum screen, where the semi-physical and semi-digital “worm” is generated randomly, and passes through a reading point that creates a collage of constantly changing sounds.
Most of the works “are interacting with each other, activating each other,” as is the case of Silence pockets (2015), which combines a story about sound camouflage in times of war invented by the photojournalist Dante Vacchi—who ended up becoming a mercenary—with research carried out by Marta Moita’s behavioral neuroscience laboratory, at the Champalimaud Center, on the social transmission of fear through silence. .
The artist “is interested in scientific experiments, the dysfunction of human perception, when we see something that does not correspond to reality, and the use of sound to create a somatic reaction in the viewer,” said the curator.
The works use visual, sound and spatial elements “to construct synesthetic proposals that reveal and destabilize our perception, questioning its mechanics, its limits and its reliability,” according to the curator.
Another of the works in the exhibition that stands out for its use of sound is Red sky falls (2019), composed of a giant screen projection of a mountain used by the MacOS High Sierra operating system, linked to the global seismic activity detection system.
When an earthquake occurs anywhere in the world, the stereotypical mountain landscape changes in sync, and a violent soundtrack comes out of the loudspeaker and fills the entire exhibition.
Bruno Marchand indicated that this exhibition “was built like a brain with two hemispheres,” and “it is a kind of living body,” pulsating according to the sounds, images and mutual activations of Alexandre Estrela’s pieces.
Nature hates the monster It is also the artist’s first major solo exhibition in a Portuguese institution since his presentation in Serralves, in 2013, and since then he has exhibited in international museums and art centers, such as the Rainha Sofia Museum, in Spain, the M HKA, in Belgium, and the Rufino Tamayo Museum, in Mexico, as well as the MoMA, in New York.
On Friday the exhibition opens simultaneously. Editorial Errânciaby the artist Isabel Carvalho, born in Porto, in 1977. This exhibition presents a selection of posters, brochures, books, handkerchiefs and magazines, printed on different media, exhibited together for the first time.
The works highlight the artist’s continuous activity in the universe of editions and publications, which, according to the curator, Catarina Rosendo, “has been as constant as her visual practice”, in which she shares a universe of ecofeminist and queer concerns, as well as an interest in linguistic processes of meaning.
Artist, writer, designer, editor and distributor, Isabel Carvalho participated from an early age, along with her individual artistic practice, “in projects that have been blurring the boundaries between writing and image and questioning the notion of authorship,” according to the curator.
In 2007, with the graphic designer Pedro Nora, he founded Braço de Ferro, a publishing house that, until 2011, produced dozens of publications, including books and artist stories, reflections on design, the working conditions of artists and the Portuguese institutional fabric. .
Isabel Carvalho created, in 2017, the magazine Leonora dedicated to exploring artistic expression as a form of knowledge, a project that she still maintains today.
at the exhibition Editorial ErrânciaInstalled in the small space of the Culturgest 3 gallery – where the old bookstore was located – a stepped construction was placed that the public can use to sit and consult the author’s magazines.
Source: Observadora
