“In the Middle of Something”
Artists: Catarina Real, Diana Carvalho, Felícia Teixeira e João Brojo, Frederico Brízida, João Gabriel Pereira, Paulo Osório e Pedro Huet
Curator: Nuno Ramalho
How do you imagine the world in ten years time?
This idea was passed onto the 8 artists, all at the start of their careers, which are part of the exhibition “A meio de qualquer coisa” (in the middle of something): Catarina Real, Diana Carvalho, the duo Felícia Teixeira and João Brojo, Frederico Brízida, João Gabriel Pereira, Paulo Osório and Pedro Huet.
The early call soon gave way to the plural concerns that characterize each of these artists’ individual performances. Their approaches naturally proceeded by questioning multiple plans that, even so and following a non-choreographed arrangement, i.e. free from the constraints of an exercise in curating, establish amongst themselves a network of reflections.
Early on some common points emerged, such as the one established around questions regarding identity – that of the subject in regards to her or himself, through a sense of communication in regards to others, in what she or he extends towards a culturally, economically, technologically, politically complex world, and furthermore in the manifestation of codes and spaces contained by the crossing of all such connections.
Thus it becomes the questioning of that which institutes and affirms itself in the world, eventually shaping it, taking as measuring unit the individual and hers or his agency. Artistic productions are concretely included in this regard, as are their processes, forms and contents, always capable of operating beyond the limits and visibility determined by their very own condition. The works we can witness in this exhibition come forward in that perspective; they seek to expand in a non-dogmatic fashion the questioning of the ways in which art effectively affects the world it belongs to – as well as that other, more distant and future, which it helps bring forward.
Uniting these artists one can also find the will to move beyond the technological voracity that has become synonymous with their generation, more often than not redundantly. In fact, for the most part the exhibited works share an outlook aimed at those means and solutions that inscribe in this very moment, one of hyper velocities and permanent bedazzlement regarding the latest app, the possibilities of artistic thinking and making unlike those one would expect to find among such young artists.
The map drawn out by the ensemble of the interventions thus points to the presence of that which is unsettling within current times, which are ours and by which we are accountable. Paradoxically, said map answers speculatively to shared questions about certain densities and opacities regarding the future, and what it can hold. The world in ten, twenty, six hundred years does not stop at that which imagines it; it is being made, from the present, and through its discussion, thus also through these works.
Nuno Ramalho, February 2016
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