Alexandre Perigot. Pipedream

Pipedream, the title for the exhibition conceived by Alexandre Perigot for the Museu Coleção Berardo, refers most obviously to wishful fantasy. But it also points to the proliferation of pipes through which energy, fluids and other material goods are exchanged between countries – oil, gas, money, information…

Alexandre Perigot’s works generate unending flows of images which redraw the game rules of international geopolitics. At the same time, Perigot is keenly interested in the seductive power of the image: drawing on everything from the homes of the stars to video games, from rock concerts to cinematic references, the artist has set up vast installations at the Museu Berardo which equip the viewer to question how images are produced and perceived.

Like a giant maze, Palaispopeye invites the viewer to explore a rambling set of rotating stages and moving partitions which are covered with a single photographic image, spread over 300 m2 of wall space: the village built on Malta in 1980 for the shooting of Robert Altman’s Popeye. The meandering route taken by the visitor and the enlargement of the photograph muddles the perception of space and time. The image is endlessly broken down and reconstructed, Popeye’s village unfolds and then closes in on itself on the photographic surface. Like in a film being edited, the cuts and joins serve to multiply scenarios.

Blondasses: A video showing how wigs were constructed from straw in the fields of south-west France. The hairstyles of Claudia Schiffer, Britney Spears and Pamela Andersen imposed on the agricultural landscape. Might today’s celebrities be the first genetically modified organisms?

Île des morts / James Bond Island: A photographic take on James Bond Island in Thailand, presented side by side with Arnold Böcklin’s famous Isle of the Dead (1886). The architectural resemblance is striking, and the myth of Charon ferrying the dead is set against the legend of James Bond. The soundtrack – The Man With the Golden Gun, version Fado – is interpreted by Afonso Guerreiro.

Maison Témoin, Maison d’Elvis is a life-size model of Elvis Presley’s house built in steel scaffolding pipes. This powerful metal skeleton invites the viewer and musicians to walk through the simple, bare structure, offering a metaphor for the legend of the King and for crossovers in creative music making.

Fighting Asshole is a set of diptyches combining a photograph of the eye of a cyclone with a drawing of a karate hold. The fighter appears to be locked in an absurd combat with these climatic monsters which, from a distance, resemble assholes. Fighting Asshole cannot help evoking Dom Quixote battling with windmills, except here the windmills are replaced by cyclones which provide a metaphor for the absurdity of the race to performance in the stellar emptiness of our wholly globalised consumer society.

Olé Ola is a long metal arm from which is suspended a large patchwork of football scarves. The motion of the arm simulates the movement of the red rag used in the arena by bullfighters. Here, the exhibition visitor takes the place of the bull and the fabric of the muleta is sacrificed to the expression of club and national identities. Voluntary blurring of boundaries? Levelling of identities? A dynamic combination of artistic and sporting practices? It depends on your point of view…

Sometimes You Win Sometimes You Lose is a structure in which the title phrase is written out in plastic tubes, stretching through the museum galleries. The structure contains a mysterious object propelled through the circuit of tubing, producing a jerky noise as it moves. By mentally tracking the noise, the viewer can reconstruct the shape of the writing.

In Funkypipe, a mechanical system sets bookcases dancing in front of a tapestry reproducing a popular painting of oil derricks against a background of a setting sun in Baku. The undulating movement produced by the different bookcases is somewhere between drunkenness and belly dancing, set against the distant power games of the energy economy. In an absurd erotic-romantic twist, Funkypipe manages to turn the crisis of international geopolitics on its head.