LISBON.- The Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology opened three exhibitions at the Power Station building, featuring Portuguese artists Carlos Bunga, at the centre of a mid-career retrospective show focusing on the intense relationships of his paintings, sculptures and installations with the field of architecture, and Ana Santos, with a new project for the Ashpit 8 Room. On the same date, the museum opens Hello, Robot. - a partnership with Vitra Design Museum providing an outlook on the presence of robots in popular culture and in near-future societies.
To start the Spring season, MAAT presents the international group show Fiction and Fabrication, which offers an important panorama of photographic practices in the digital era, with particular focus on architectural representations. Marking 30 years since Photoshop was invented, this exhibition comprises works by nearly 50 artists, including Doug Aitken, Celine Condorelli, Thomas Demand, Filip Dujardin, Andreas Gurski, Beate Gutschow, Veronika Kellndorfer, Edgar Martins, Bas Princen, Martha Rosler, Thomas Ruff, Jeff Wall, James Welling, among many others.
As well as a strong exhibition programme, MAAT will also keep investing heavily on public programmes in partnership with other institutions, featuring collaborations with the Architecture Faculty of the University of Porto, on a major symposium on architecture photography, as well as with BoCA – Biennial of Contemporary Arts, on intersections between performance, architecture and the world of music and dance.
Carlos Bunga: The Architecture of Life, Environments, Sculptures, Paintings and Films
‘My project is a kind of architecture; it’s not a real space but a mental idea.’ Carlos Bunga’s (b.1976) sculptural and painterly structures propose architecture as both body and mindscape. The exhibition begins with a small model of social housing where the artist grew up. It is the beginning of a journey from the miniature to the monumental. Using only cardboard and paint, Bunga builds fantastical architectural models, furniture as sculptures and paintings as immersive environments. His works combine a powerful materiality with the evocation of psychic states. Animated by films of his actions and performances, along with documentation of a decade of works, this is the first major survey of Bunga’s work. Enacting cycles of construction and destruction, Bunga explores states of dispossession and nomadism; the nature of spatial experience; and the creative and symbolic potential of ruins.
Curated by Iwona Blazwick | Jan. 22 – May 20, 2019 | Central 2 [CENTRAL]
Carlos Bunga - Where I am Free | Partnership with Fundação Carmona e Costa
Where I am free is the first exhibition exclusively dedicated to the role of drawing in Carlos Bunga’s oeuvre. The show brings together a selection of drawings, sketches and notes — some of which had been stored in the artist’s archive for more than a decade and had never been exhibited —, but also recent works specially produced for the Fundação Carmona e Costa.
This exhibition is the result of a collaboration between the Fundação Carmona e Costa and the MAAT, which presents the artist’s first large survey show in Portugal. The simultaneous exhibitions offer a unique opportunity to revisit Carlos Bunga’s earlier works, but also to discover his most recent creations and the career of one of the most fascinating artists of his generation — and the recipient of the New Artists Award | Fundação EDP in 2003. In the context of these two exhibitions, and in collaboration with the Spanish publishing house Ediciones Polígrafa, a catalogue will be launched that will include a vast selection of images, as well as texts and essays by several authors.
Curated by Inês Grosso | Jan. 22 – March 16, 2019 |
Other exhibitions opening on January 22:
Hello, Robot. Design Between Human and Machine examines the current boom in robotics. It comprises more than 200 exhibits from the fields of design and art and includes robots used in the home, in nursing care, and industry, as well as computer games, media installations, and examples of films and literature featuring robots. It shows the wide variety of forms that robotics takes today while broadening our awareness of the associated ethical, social and political issues.
This exhibition introduces us to robots in four steps: the first traces the fascination that robots have long exerted over people and looks at how popular culture has shaped our perception of robots. The second is devoted to the field in which robotics first made a breakthrough: industry and the working environment. The third shows how we are gradually coming face-to-face with this new technology – as a friend and helper in our everyday lives. The last section looks at the increasing blurring of boundaries between humans and robots. For while robotics has become more approachable, more personal, more essential even, the question remains: does it make our world any better?
Curated by Amelie Klein, Thomas Geisler, Marlies Wirth | Advising Curator: Fredo De Smet
In 2013, Ana Santos was awarded the EDP New Artists Prize, and she has now been invited by MAAT to present the exhibition ANÁTEMA [ANATHEMA], which gathers a set of her recently produced original works. Broadly fitting within the medium of sculpture – or, more specifically, of the production of objects – her work is based on the search for a very particular state of alertness. By favouring sensitivity and intuition as instances which aim to highlight the uniqueness of the creative act, her pieces are the result of a thought process about the formal, functional, morphological or chromatic features of certain materials or found objects and about the relationships she might want to try out or establish between them. She is interested in a type of practice, often reduced to minimal interference, in which the traditional values associated with sculpture – as a subject – are frequently questioned by an idea of precariousness, strangeness, of not belonging, of lightness or fragility.
Curated by Ana Anacleto | Jan. 22 – May 20, 2019 | Ashpit 8 [CENTRAL
