SNBA - Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes
Rua Barata Salgueiro 36, 1250-044 Lisboa
Monday to Friday: 12:00-19:00
Saturday: 14:00-19:00
09/09 - 08/10/2022
Opening: September 9, 18:00 - 20:00
Alexandre Delmar, “Monumentos Acidentais”
Lisa Kohl, “The Line”
Pedro Lobo, “Um Livro Doloroso”
Silja Yvette, “Metaphysics of Core Matter”
©Alexandre Delmar, “Monumentos Acidentais”
Alexandre Delmar, “Monumentos Acidentais”
Synopsis
This series, which I call “Accidental Monuments”, is an ongoing project that began in 2007. Here, I am interested in the "mistakes" and the "suspension" in the landscape and also interested in the performative and sculptural aspect of these objects/bodies that I am encountering through my travels. I see them as a kind of totem.
I think there is an ironic tension between the familiarity of these objects that, despite being so distant from each other, occupy a certain universal space
Bio
Alexandre Delmar (Porto, 1982) lives and works between the city of Porto and the village of Lagoa, in Trás-os-Montes.
n 2005 he finished his Bachelor's Degree at Escola Superior Artística do Porto and in 2007 he graduated in Audiovisual Communication Technologies at ESMAE.
He was artist in residence at Open Studios in Prague (Czech Republic) at Frauga-XVI Encontros da Primavera in Picote. He received a scholarship from Fundação Oriente (Kolkata, India), from the Criatório do Porto competition and from the Porto Design Biennale satellite activities program. He was one of the artists awarded at the XXI Cerveira International Art Biennial with “A Fala das Cabras e dos Pastores”. In 2021, he created “A Recoletora”, together with Maria Ruivo, and published, in co-authorship, the book “Notes From The Underdog” by Spector Books.
©Lisa Koh, “The Line”, film still, 2019
Lisa Kohl, “The Line”
Audio-visual installation, HD, 6min.
Tijuana, US-Mexican border, 2019
Synopsis
Lisa Kohl engages with the poetic notion of non-places and transitional spaces, such as no man’s lands and border zones, while focusing on human life and survival. Existential questions accompany her artistic research on a metaphorical level, revolving around themes of visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, location and placelessness. Her current practice focuses on photographic series, sculptural installations and video-sound performances that oscillate between documentation and staging. Image, sound and material-related elements create images and spaces of association based on real contexts and personal statements, opening up atmospheric and experiential spaces in which the supremacy of reality is questioned in a poetic and sensitive way. The audio-visual installation “The Line”, recorded at the US-Mexican border at Tijuana, shows the perspective of a drone. Visually, it creates a division of the image, a border. This bird’s - eye view aims to evoke divine surveillance and power. The repetitive and meditative rhythm of the waves is accompanied by a voiceover which tells of identity, of the homeland, the crossing of borders, of futility and of hope.
Bio
Lisa Kohl was born in Luxembourg City in 1988. As a graduate of the National School Superior of Visual Arts La Cambre (Brussels), she has developed an artistic practice which takes on various shapes: photographic series, sculptural installations, video and sound performances. Her work speaks of flight, exile, the non-places of life and survival, invisibility and absence. Through the poetic aesthetics of the image, she invites us to reflect on identity, the crossing of boundaries, hope and futility. In 2019 she was a scholarship holder at the Artists Residence Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, USA. Realised in unique territories in Greece, California or at the Mexican Border, her photographic work has been recognised by several awards : nomination for the Edward Steichen Award (2019) ; winner of the Pierre Werner Award (2020), StART-up Studio Award of the Foundation of the Œuvre Nationale de Secours Grande-Duchesse Charlotte (2020-2021). Curated by Danielle Igniti, the non-profit Lët’z Arles showed Lisa Kohl’s project ERRE, at the Chapelle de la Charité, during the Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles in July 2021.
n 2022, Lisa Kohl received a scholarship for a six-month residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (funded by Kultur | lx – Arts Council Luxembourg).
©Pedro Lobo
Pedro Lobo, “Um Livro Doloroso”
Synopsis
Augusto dos Anjos was the name that came to mind when I finished reading the book Not Yet by the Brazilian photographer Pedro S. Lobo (2020). Other artists, poets and musicians also deserve to be mentioned in connection with this funereal and decrepit display, that torments the soul... The bizarre figures and landscapes of the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, the eerie whims of the Spaniard Francisco de Goya, the execution machine in Franz Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’, the sacrificial danse orchestrated by Igor Stravinsky in his ballet The Rite of Spring, the gloomy voices of Nick Cave, Tom Waits and Mark Lanegan. Those are some of the references that seem to form the visual discourse on display in this photography book by Pedro Lobo. As if monsters, worms, foetid odours, ammoniacal, endemic wounds, infections, pus and phlegm were all there, infectious agents out of verse and into the pain in our lives. We see as if through the eyes of the doomed and enigmatic Brazilian poet, Augusto dos Anjos.
But the book can be even more painful. In the burnt woods, cracked soils, peeling paintings, desecrated statues, rusty road signs, abandoned bones, roadkill, patches, crevices and gnawed objects, we recognize ourselves: humanity. A species that doesn’t see itself in what it destroys, but apart from its own place, the earth that it corrodes. In these pictures, we don’t see our own death – in a daily suicidal act –, but that of another, an abstract, soulless, exiled being. However, it is us, we are the protagonists, so well represented in these dark pages that amount to our History. It is our civilising hand that built for itself an idea of nature and humanism that does not realise that what it flaunts as glory is the impulse of its very own death. Not Yet is this: a powerful narrative of that funeral procession that is the Anthropocene. A shrill warning of the fatal escalation in which we have gotten ourselves into, and out of which, up until now, we have done little to escape.
EDUARDO AUGUSTO COSTA, Professor in the Department of History of Arqchitecture and Aesthetics of Project of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo, he researches Visual Culture and Intellectual History: archives and collections of architecture, linked to the Programme Young Researcher of the Foundation for the Support of Research of the State of São Paulo (Fapesp).
Bio
Pedro Lobo studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. From 1978 to 1985 he worked as photographer and researcher for the National Center for Cultural Reference (CNRC), in Brazil, with Aloísio Magalhães, and for the Institute for National Historical and Artistic Heritage of Brazil (IPHAN), where he was responsible for the photographic documentation in the classification process by UNESCO of the cities of Olinda, Ouro Preto, Salvador, Santuário de Bom Jesus de Matosinhos and São Miguel das Missões as World Heritage sites. In his photographic series about Brazilian favelas (“Architecture of Survival”), and about the prisons of Carandiru and Medellin (“Imprisoned Spaces”), Pedro Lobo uses architecture photography to portray the human condition. He has participated in solo shows and group exhibitions in museums and galleries in Brazil, Portugal, the USA, Denmark, Germany, China and Colombia. His work can be seen in several museums and private collections. He is a CAPES-Fulbright scholar and has received the V Premio Marc Ferrez award, and the Vitae Photography scholarship. He now lives in Borba, Portugal, and works both in Europe, the US and in Brazil.
©Silja Yvette, 2021.
Silja Yvette, “Metaphysics of Core Matter”
Synopsis
It all started with a burning interest in omnipresent Styrofoam packaging that flooded our homes with purchases and online orders. Silja Yvette couldn't shake the feeling that this material and its industrial press forms could be like a pigment of our time. A kind of toolbox of modernity. An imprint of the things we desire. And yet, despite its omnipresence, so rarely represented in works of art itself, probably because of its impermanent qualities.
“Metaphysics of Core Matter” became an artistic investigation of massively used contemporary materials, their eco-friendly innovation, and their integration into art production practice. This refers to materials such as foam, Styrofoam, and aluminum that are extracted from the earth‘s core through often devastating extraction techniques. At the same time, we already speak of the aluminum age, so ever-present it finds its way into all products, in food, in the air, in medicines and also in photography. Silja Yvette stages these single-use materials from private consumption, logistics and industrial production as temporary sculptures photographically, in her studio, at companies working with packaging, recycling and material innovation as well as in photographic labs and materials testing labs.
There is a particular contrast that appeals to the artist about foams and polystyrene as inventions of the modern age: the wrapping, protecting, insulating, the spatial surroundings of the actual, the negative casting of all preciousnesses on the one hand and the vainly trivial handling on the other. Useful, but worthless. Decaying in the fulfillment of its unique logistic mission and then excessively inferior. Silja Yvette calls it: the foams paradox.
What concerns her furthermore about these photographic sculptures is the foamy, the enveloping, the volume-expanding. A kind of visualized air or cavity in cellular structure. The filling of an air space around the product, what we actually intend to possess. The airtight sealing and severing of living things. The doubling, tripling, quadrupling of protective shells. And contrary to all better-intentioned efforts, the packaging industry has exploded in the last two years showcasing all their know-how in separating layers, protective films and hygienic vapor barriers.
While working on this series, Silja Yvette also looked at the production factors of her photographs and came up with an eco-friendly solution that uses high-quality bio-based and recycled materials.
Bio
Silja Yvette is a German artist who lives and works in Berlin and Frankfurt am Main (Germany). She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Städelschule, Frankfurt in 2011 and added studies in architecture until 2010 and philosophy until 2018. She has been exhibiting works in individual and group shows in Germany since 2006, since 2011 in other European countries and in 2016 in Beijing. In 2020, she was featured in gallery exhibitions in Paris and at the Imago Lisboa Photo Festival 2020. In 2017 her first monograph Season of Admin was published at Kerber Verlag and was selected for “Longlist of Most Beautiful German Books 2018“ of Stiftung Buchkunst (Frankfurt/ Leipzig). With Collective Creatures her second monograph followed and was published in 2019 by Hatje Cantz which won silver at the renowned Deutscher Fotobuchpreis 19/20 (German Photobook Award). In 2019, she was nominated for the prestigious Edward Steichen Award (LU).
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