BRAGA.- The CIAJG 2025 exhibition programme embraces a zigzag dynamic. The exhibition in our gallery unfolds into a journey through different temporalities and spaces. With the poetical and technical assistance of many individuals (choreographers, writers, travellers, artists, collectors, ancestors, “old masters”, art makers…), we hope that our programme will raise awareness about the importance of the shared experience of art. As the artist José de Guimarães once said: Art is invention, it is unreal in the present.

Upcoming exhibitions:

Opening May 17, until September 21, 2025
Alexandre Estrela: Ecos da Figura Interna
Following his naturalistic approach in A Natureza Aborrece o Monstro at Culturgest (Lisbon) Alexandre Estrela presents the second instalment of a three-part exhibition—an interlude engaging in a dialogue with animation and cartoons.

Continuing to explore the exhibition as a medium in its own right, Estrela will transform the ground floor of CIAJG into a meticulously orchestrated experience. Visitors will be guided through the galleries by spectral and technical choreography, experiencing the gallery as a living, unfolded and evolving space. Each installation will explore drawing and painting as structural foundations—”skeletons”—for digital apparitions, or “phantoms” that echo the primal rhythms of multi-cellular life.

Echoes of the Inner Figure, continues the research on animation tested in exhibitions in Mexico City and Lisbon, as well as farO’s recent Cartoons screenings focused on Vasco Granja. Shaping the artist’s early years, Granja’s eclectic programming on Portuguese public television in the 1970’s reflected a global divide between the commercial approach of North American animation and the experimental modernist slant of Eastern European films.

Since the beginning of 1990s, Alexandre Estrela’s work (Lisbon, 1971) has been distinguished by the original and idiosyncratic manner in which it brings together and superimposes a wide range of domains, themes and references. His recent solo exhibitions include View Sonic (Travesía Cuatro, 2024), A Natureza Aborrece o Monstro (Culturgest, 2024), Mickey Mouth (with René Bértholo—Uppercut, 2023), Forgotten Sounds of Tomorrow (Galeria Bruno Múrias, 2022), Día Eléctrico (with João Maria Gusmão—Travesía Cuatro, CDMX, 2021), among others.

This exhibition is supported by RPAC in collaboration with Culturgest (Lisbon) and MACE (Elvas).

Curated by Marta Mestre.

Opening May 17, until September 21, 2025
Unknown Portuguese Master, Inferno (Hell), c. 1510–1520
Filmed by Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela
This painting offers us a medieval image of Hell, cataloguing the eternal torments related to the seven deadly sins. The figuration of Vanity in the form of three naked women, hanging upside down with their hair on fire, is reminiscent of the three graces of Apollo’s retinue. The lovers, bound together and symbolising Lust, at the opposite end of the painting, seem to derive straight from Dante, highlighting the picture’s plurality of iconographic sources. This diversity can also be seen in the linking of the demonic world to the world beyond Europe: Lucifer wears a headdress of Amerindian feathers, and is depicted sitting on an African chair, holding an African-looking ivory horn; another demon is also clad in feathers. Portuguese painting was quick to incorporate the image of the Brazilian Indian into the world of Christianity. Who is the “Other”?

Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela have been collaborating since 2010. Their practice is developed from the moving image, materialised through films and immersive and site-specific environments, in conjunction with drawing, painting, photography or sculpture.

Curated by Marta Mestre and João Terras.

Until April 27, 2025
CHÃO: Carmela Gross, Fuentesal Arenillas, Ghislaine Leung, Gordon Matta-Clark/ Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes—Chile, Lorenza Böttner, Márcia X and Ricardo Ventura, Pepe Espaliú, Pope.L, Ricardo Basbaum, Teresa Silva, Trisha Brown and Tunga
CHÃO is a choreography-exhibition that articulates different levels of height and explores movement as a disruptive device in the dynamics of the traditional museum space. The idea resonates with artistic experiments from the 1960s and 1970s, and expands after the core question is posed: what if the entire experience had resulted from a body without any vertical dimension, near the ground?

Exchange our hands with our feet, or our feet with our abdomen. Spin horizontally, drop in circles, crawl. CHÃO combines works and documents by artists who cause displacements in architectural, linguistic and institutional structures, with choreography, performativity and the musical score as bases for action. In this exhibition, conceived on the basis of the CIAJG’s construction site, architecture is formulated as a body that is cut, crossed and perforated, which, instead of widening distances, enhances articulations and rebounds between elevations and depths.

Curated by Julia Coelho, Marta Mestre and Renan Araujo. Exhibition architecture by Diogo Passarinho Studio with RAR.STUDIO.

Mauro Cerqueira: Chants for a Dead Donkey
The exhibition revolves around the most recent works by the artist Mauro Cerqueira (Guimarães, 1980), resulting from two consecutive trips that he made to Morocco. The first was in search of writers such as Jean Genet and Muhammad Chukri, while the second took him to the Middle Atlas, to meet Berber nomadic musicians. The title, Chants for a Dead Donkey, is an allegory that links these two journeys, reflecting the artist’s practice of giving names and forms to undefined places, and parallel and anonymous stories.

These works slow down and unfold the overall narrative of the exhibition. Through painting, video, and sound, the cartography of Chants for a Dead Donkey focuses on the universes of poetry and travel, exploring them as key spaces for rereading history and territories.

Mauro Cerqueira (Guimarães, 1982) lives and works in Porto. He has regularly exhibited his works since the mid-2000s at various national and international institutions, including: the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Institute for New Connotative Action, Museu Coleção Berardo, Kunsthalle Freeport, Caixa Cultural do Rio de Janeiro, and many others. With the artist André Sousa, he founded the independent space A Certain Lack of Coherence.

Curated by João Terras.

Flávia Vieira: Milagro
#insidethecollection
Milagro (Miracle) is an installation that occupies two galleries of the museum and aims to establish an open and contingent dialogue with the pre-Columbian artefacts of the CIAJG’s collection, in particular their material properties such as pigments and clay, which derive from various cultures that occupied part of the territory of Central and South America, and which belong to a chronological period between 500 BC and 1532 AD.

Flávia Vieira (Braga, 1983) develops her work based on cultural, historical and political narratives associated with the processes of making art, exploring notions of identity, memory and collective representation, botanical diaspora and otherness.