Exhibition Text

A Bird’s Eye View

There has always been ample evidence of the structural and conceptual nature of drawing. However, as is so often the case, we need someone to remind us for this to become truly clear. Beatriz Albuquerque gifts us one of these moments by revealing, via this present work, the matrix of her thinking. 

In 2021, in the Artist’s Testimonies created for MNAC, the artist shared with the public what she defined as the way in which she “controls” the methods and means by which she develops her multidisciplinary work. Using performance as a springboard from which everything evolves (installation, video, photography, ceramics), the artist accumulates and mentally synthesizes (“my mind, my studio”) the very fabric of life, interweaving the data of experience — physical and temporal. 

Experience, being centered on the body, is essentially organic. Now, every organism is action, which is the same as saying that each movement of the body is a latent drawing, since drawing presupposes the act that unites thought, observation and recording. Before addressing this, however, allow me to dwell on the best-known aspect of her work: performance. 

Beatriz Albuquerque’s work has this fundamental aspect of movement in which the image of the world (the real, the visible and its construct) adapts to the vision and action of her body, to the relationship between perception and sensation. It also has, through this same logic, sociopolitical aspects that merge with the complex notion of time intertwined with personal and collective memories. For this reason, she addresses issues ranging from emigration (in this case, Portuguese) to ecology, including the denunciation of violence in its various psychic and physical forms (including those of social forms in the constant search for power and status), and simultaneously encompasses a clear taste for playfulness and even humor (see the performances Crisis of Luck and Predict the Future through Chocolate, from 2013 and 2024, respectively). We can therefore state that her work has always been endowed with a relational poetics. To these relational poetics I would like to attribute the value of dialogue, the exchange negotiated through words, an art somewhat lost in the voracity of the day, but to which Beatriz Albuquerque resorts, developing it through the pendular path of listening and giving. But why do I define it this way? 

Because when building her work on the observation and reception of readings, memories (her own and/or others), landscapes, past and present experiences, the assimilation of the world has the act of giving as a natural counterpart. After nourishing oneself and reflecting upon this nutrition, the response to the other is a logical and necessary symmetry.

Dialogue is, therefore, a line of multiple movements. If it results from the desire to listen and express oneself, it also implies transposing the result of one’s curiosity or desire. Take the case of the 2005 performance, Work for Free, in which the artist created works at the request of the public, offering her work, transforming it into a gift, a critique of social structures which, above all, value money. 

Let us now return to drawing. The series, generically entitled Day & Night, despite the particular naming of each piece as Concrete (with serialization in Roman numerals), is described as “Preparatory study of the movements of bodies in space (seen from above)”. Beatriz Albuquerque demonstrates the point of view of her movement from a higher place — not only that of the thought that generates it, but that of a superior place, of another space, in which our role as actors (taken literally, as those who act) is clarified in the relationship. In reciprocity, and in the way in which the movement is recorded.

By naming this text “A Bird’s Eye View”, I refer precisely to how the drawings are conceived and described by the artist, to reveal the space (ground) in which her movements will develop in the realization of her performances. We perceive lines pre-written here, anticipating the movements of her body. All 25 drawings, on paper or cotton fabric, utilize charcoal as a common denominator, to which is added graphite (only five are graphite-free) complemented by occasional pigments and markers. All of them present intricate and intersecting lines of different colors that scrawl upon the space like cartographic trajectories of a vast intergalactic scenario towards numerous astronomical worlds, punctuated by planets or other astral bodies. Dance and drawing (like all performance and the entire wavelength of this author’s creation) constitute this oscillation, of coming and going, step and counterstep, welcoming and giving. This explains the scoring of the videos and the proposal for new performances to be included in the program. 

The drawings are therefore predictions; but they are pure drawings, in the pleasure of their geometry and in the systematization of gesture. In this sense, they are spatially and corporally unreal, because they only imply living angles. Absent is the modulation of orbits, before the ruler is drawn, that guide the gaze and the body that follows it (we recognize how dancers draw this geometry, their gaze guiding their bodies in spatial evolutions, even as in classical dance, undulating within imaginary circles). From the presence of circular bodies, or half-moons, another reference flourishes by removing the ground: infinity. Is the map of Beatriz’s wanderings, therefore, a guide on stage or on a star chart? Does her political, historical and ecological consciousness place her in a panorama above the stage, affirming her personal movement in a cosmological drift? I would like to believe that in some way this holds true, and that the drawing, which precedes everything, unites everything and signifies everything. The sculptural figures in graphite (the result of an artistic residency at Viarco, a pencil company whose utensils are ubiquitous for most Portuguese). In this case, doing it with human forms (Beatriz transmuted into Venus?) the drawing again traces, points and shapes. 

Emília Ferreira

Almada, April 2, 2025

(Translated by David Moscovich)

BIO

Beatriz Albuquerque (Porto, Portugal) is an artist, performer, teacher and researcher (they/them). They hold a PhD from Columbia University in New York with a Foundation for Science and Technology Scholarship and a Fulbright/Luso-American Foundation Scholarship. They completed their degree at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto and their Master of Fine Arts at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They have been awarded several prizes and mentions such as the Myers Art Award from Columbia University, New York, as well as the Revelation Award from the 17th Cerveira Biennial in Portugal and the Ambient Series Performance Award, PAC/edge Performance Festival, Chicago. They have collaborated with European and American research centers, chairs and institutes, integrating projects, giving lectures and publishing essays that bring into dialogue his areas of training and scientific interest as well as the interdisciplinarity of the media he uses, including drawing, moving images, photography, installation and, above all, performance. They have held several individual and collective exhibitions, nationally and internationally, notably: Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, Chicago Cultural Center in Chicago; Chelsea Art Museum, The Kitchen, Emily Harvey Foundation, Anthology Film Archives, Queens Museum, MoMA PS1 in New York; 10th International Istanbul Biennial in Türkiye; 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art in Greece; Brazilian Museum of Sculpture and Ecology in São Paulo; Museum of Contemporary Art of Bogota in Columbia; Museum of Contemporary Art of Caracas in Venezuela; Graça Brandão Gallery, Revolver Platform in Lisbon; Serralves Museum, Nuno Centeno Gallery, MCO Gallery in Porto, among others.