LISBON.- MAAT opened five exhibitions simultaneously, featuring interventions especially designed for the museum’s most iconic spaces.
The Oval Gallery presents a new commission by Danish artist Jesper Just, with a dialogue between two extraordinary video installations, Pedro Tudela reinvents the spatial and sensory experience of the Turbine Hall in an intersection of sound, sculpture and machinery, and Carla Filipe proposes a new appropriation of the Project Room with a provocative aesthetical combination, somewhere between political memory and the future of art.
This year will also see Amanda Levete’s rooftop being occupied for the first time. Encompassing the recently-inaugurated pedestrian bridge, French artist Xavier Veilhan brought an intriguing sculpture installation to this new Lisbon viewpoint.
Jesper Just - Servitudes – Circuits (Interpassivities)
Using the exhibition architecture as a medium that enters into a dialogue with film projections, Danish artist Jesper Just transforms the Oval Gallery into a couple of emotional spaces inhabited by fleeting characters that reflect the human condition in the present era, in a site-specific intervention. Through sound, built structures and deconstructed moving images, the artist alters the physicality and perception of exhibition spaces, obstructing the normal flow of museum visitors. This performative approach makes the visitor adjust to unexpected conditions, testing ideas of agency, self-conscience and physical boundaries.
In a collaboration with Copenhagen’s Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Servitudes – Circuits (Interpassivities) combines and re-stages two interrelated pieces in the artist’s recent production: Servitudes, an eight-channel video installation that was first presented in 2015 at the Palais Tokyo, and Circuits, a multimedia piece presented here for the first time in a museum context, after its initial presentation at the artist’s gallery in Denmark.
Curated by Pedro Gadanho and Irene Campolmi
Xavier Veilhan – Romy and the Dogs
MAAT’s walkable rooftop is one of its recognized architectural features, emerging as a magnet for audiences who do not always visit the Museum. With a new viewpoint on the riverfront, London-based architects AL_A have turned MAAT’s public spaces into one of Lisbon’s tourist experiences. Now, the Museum programme comes out to meet these fleeting audiences face to face. French artist Xavier Veilhan is the first to use MAAT’s rooftop, with a specially-designed sculpture installation, “Romy and the dogs”, that responds to the characteristics of this unique urban space.
Presenting new cast aluminium statues which form part of an ongoing series, Veilhan proposes a figure of a woman and a pack of dogs as the new inhabitants of MAAT’s fifth façade. Playing with notions of scale, recognition and strangeness, the figures also evoke how digitally-produced artefacts have gradually been replacing traditional art objects. The exhibition’s opening is planned to coincide with ARCOlisboa, marking the first time that audiences from this art event will access MAAT through the new pedestrian bridge designed by Amanda Levete.
Curated by Pedro Gadanho and Rita Marques
Carla Filipe – Tomorrow there won’t be any art
This exhibition continues Carla Filipe’s research into the visual and graphic strategies used in the political narrative, specifically protest banners. The project presents a set of symbols and graphic images taken from the political post-25 April 1974 narrative, while removing all manual plasticity from it. The banner is the shape chosen to materialise her complex, large-scale compositions, where repetitions of and variations on the base elements, taken from the graphic materials gathered from political demonstrations in the country’s recent history, subjugate and contradict their own source and identity. Filipe uses these images, superficially depoliticised or devoid of any political agency, in order to question the role of the artist in the current sociopolitical context. Deprived of individual protesting capacity and without the power of a collective body to support her, the artist issues the threat Tomorrow there won’t be any art, as an attempt to mobilise people to react to the challenges faced by the artistic community.
Curated by João Mourão and Luís Silva
Pedro Tudela - awdiˈtɔrju
With a career spanning over 30 years, Pedro Tudela cuts across disciplines such as painting, drawing, sculpture, installation and photography, as well as sound interventions. The title of his current exhibition is awdiˈtɔrju – the phonetic transcription of the word auditorium in Portuguese. The Boiler Hall, through a project created in a dialogue with the space, becomes a stage for an immersive experience: there is a sound piece which accompanies three moments throughout which the space is inhabited by one sculpture and two installations, in a meticulously designed choreography based on elements such as a suspended bell (made specifically for this context) in a fragile balance with wings lying on the ground, seven bell jars dripping into as many black holes, and a hallway of light covered by transparent tiles. The bells and their sounds, edited into a sensorial and compelling composition, the bell jars, the fallen wings and the light used as an escape, all become part of a complex allegory alerting us to the conditions in which we currently inhabit our natural environment and how we abuse it.
Curated by Miguel Von Hafe Pérez
