From the solitude of place to a vanishing horizon

This exhibition claims the collective mnemonic that modernity has tended to ignore over the course of the twentieth century. The tensions bred by the spaces of political, historical and cultural confinement, intersecting with our daily lives, are re-articulated in the discursivity that these works both present and raise. Like circles within circles partaking of neither horizon nor exteriority, in a space where contemporary life is consumed in planetary suburbia, the scenarios constructed here invoke realities that have ceaselessly ravaged the production of the visual arts in the past two decades. In essence, the artists shown here have attempted to determine the emergence of conflicting but unique situations linked to the torpor and indifference or amnesia of our new societies. The recourse to: a documentary idiom; the invocation of the ideological density of simple, almost neutral objects; the unknown or reinterpreted images that cut across different areas… these are the terms that play a significant role in these fictions through which we see the world.

The exhibition brings together a diversified body of works by artists from Portugal and abroad, whose work is included in the collection of the Museu Coleção Berardo and the collection of the Direção-Geral das Artes as well as works from the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea – Museu do Chiado.

Incorporated into this exhibition are the round-table discussions "Art and Collective Memory", with contributions from artists, critics, historians and academics from other fields in an attempt to situate the exhibition in a broader field of participation and reflection.