Galeria Municipal do Porto

The Galeria Municipal do Porto will reopen to the public on April 6, carrying on with the two exhibitions opened at the end of last year – Nets of Hyphae and Que horas são que horas: uma galeria de histórias – which can be visited until April 25th at the regular hours during the week and from 10am to 1pm during weekends.

Given the new measures to contain the pandemic, which determine the closure of cultural spaces from this Friday, January 15, the Galeria Municipal do Porto will be closed during the confinement period.

The Galeria Municipal do Porto has decided to temporarily suspend its Public Programmes during the month of November, according to the latest announced measures to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Therefore, the two programs scheduled for the month of November were cancelled: the conversation between Margarida Mendes and the winner of the 2nd edition of the Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize, which would take place on November 14, Saturday, at 4 pm, and the concert presenting the album Waves and Whirlpools, by Luís da Riviera, scheduled for November 15, Sunday, at 6:30 pm.

The guided tours that the Galeria Municipal do Porto conducts on the first Saturday of each month, at 4 pm, are also suspended, due to the limitation of gatherings to five people.

GMP will continue, however, with its doors open, with the exhibitions Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize – 2nd edition and Waves and Whirlpools, on view until November 15.

Admission is free, subject to the maximum limit of 30 people and other hygiene and safety rules.

The winners of the second edition of the Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize have been named. The biannual prize is aimed at artists under 40, and was created by the Porto City Council as a tribute to the former Councillor for Culture, Paulo Cunha e Silva, doctor, art critic and curator, whose professional activity was always linked to theoretical reflection on contemporary art.

Although the Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize aims to award a single artist from a group of finalists, the jury proposed dividing the monetary value of €25,000 between this edition’s six finalists – Basir Mahmood, Firenze Lai, Lebohang Kganye, Shaikha Al Mazrou, Song Ta and Steffani Jemison –, whose works are on display at the Galeria Municipal do Porto.

Due to the restrictions resulting from the pandemic situation, the jury members Isabel Lewis, John Akomfrah, Margarida Mendes and Shumon Basar were unable to visit the exhibition and personally assess the work of the finalists that they had nominated. These exceptional conditions also meant that the six finalists were unable to install or accompany the assembly of their works in the exhibition space, prior to the inauguration of the exhibition. As a result, the judges considered that it was impossible to ensure the ideal conditions for awarding a single winner of the Prize’s second edition and therefore suggested the division of the prize money between the six finalists.

The jury had already analysed the portfolios of 48 artists, selected by a group of 16 curators, appointed by them. Lastly, they selected the six finalists who have now been declared joint winners. In the words of the four jurors, these artists have “voices – aesthetic, ethical, technical – that articulate the current moment, or, even, sense what is to come.”

Basir Mahmood (Pakistan) uses video, film and photography to reflect on social and historical situations, rooted in daily life, while Firenze Lai (Hong Kong) tries to express states of expanded perception through her paintings and drawings. Lebohang Kganye (South Africa) merges fictional characters with “real” characters, to create stories that incorporate sculpture, installation and film. Sculpture is also the preferred art form of Shaikha Al Mazrou (UAE), who is fascinated by materiality in art, working with colour and shapes to create geometric and abstract arrangements.

Song Ta (China) often seeks to provoke and antagonise the established boundaries between institutional and commercial definitions of art, by creating works that explore the daily conduct of specific groups in society and Steffani Jemison (USA) addresses privacy and opacity as strategies for abstraction and political resistance.

The exhibition of the works of the finalists – now confirmed as winners ex-aequo – can be visited until Sunday, November 15, at the Galeria Municipal do Porto. During the weekend, the GMP will only be open between 10 am and 12:30 pm, due to implementation of new curfew measures in Portugal.

Music appears at the core of Luís Lázaro Matos' practice, and the seven diptych paintings in the Galeria Municipal do Porto exhibition are inspired by the seven songs of his new album, also named Waves and Whirlpools.

The album – composed and written by Luís Lázaro Matos, sung together with Diana Policarpo and produced by Adriano Ferreira Cintra – was released on September 10 and will be played live for the first time on November 15, at the Galeria Municipal do Porto.

Activity subject to prior registration by e-mail: galeriamunicipal@agoraporto.pt.

On November 14, Saturday, the Galeria Municipal do Porto proposes a talk with Margarida Mendes (jury member of the 2nd edition of the Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize) and the winning artist.

Activity subject to prior registration by e-mail: galeriamunicipal@agoraporto.pt.

The GMP conducts a guided tour of exhibitions on the first Saturday of each month. In November, two visits will be conducted, at 4 pm and 5 pm.

Activity subject to prior registration by e-mail: galeriamunicipal@agoraporto.pt.

On October 24, Saturday, Mariana Caló e Francisco Queimadela, winners of the 1st edition of the Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize, will visit the Galeria Municipal do Porto for a talk with Guilherme Blanc (Artistic Director of the Galeria Municipal do Porto) and Luís Silva (Director of the Kunsthalle Lissabon). At 4pm, in the Auditório da Biblioteca Municipal Almeida Garrett.

Free entry, subject to the collecting of a ticket in advance, at the Galeria Municipal do Porto, starting from 10 am on October 24. You can reserve your place in advance by emailing galeriamunicipal@agoraporto.pt. The entrance is subject to room capacity.

The GMP conducts a guided tour of exhibitions on the first Saturday of each month at 4 pm.

Activity subject to prior registration by e-mail: galeriamunicipal@agoraporto.pt.

On September 13, at 4 pm, the artist Luís Lázaro Matos and the curator Martha Kirszenbaum will lead a guided tour through the exhibition Waves and Whirlpools.

Activity subject to prior registration by e-mail: galeriamunicipal@agoraporto.pt.

Technocistem: corpo e tecnologia na obra feminista de Lynn Hershman Leeson 

This book is published as part of the exhibition Diogo Jesus: Apesar de não estar, estou muito, curated by João Ribas, presented at the Galeria Municipal do Porto between June 2 and August 16, 2020. I was published by Galeria Municipal do Porto and co-published with Chili Com Carne.

Galeria Municipal do Porto reopened to the public on June 2. To ensure the safety of visitors and employees, the GMP has implemented a set of temporary measures:

21h30 – Opening

“No. One. Gives. A. Mosquito's. Ass. About. Trabalho. De. Preto  – Hino de Carne”, 2020
Performance by Nástio Mosquito
with Diogo + Moreno Ácido & B Fachada

Programme presentation 2020/2021

Colectivos Pláka's “Politics of Survival” book launch

ODETE
Dj Set

 

The artist Pedro G. Romero invited the singer Tomás de Perrate to do a closing performance for the 9Kg de Oxigénio exhibition. The visitor will be surprised by the flamenco intonations and songs about memories of imprisonment and longing for freedom, which will come from inside the work “La Cheka” to the involving gallery spaces.

Diogo Baldaia
Miragem Meus Putos
PT, 24’, 2017

Leonor Teles
Balada de um Batráquio
PT, 11’, 2016

José Rito
Will Free
PT, 12’, 2017

Andréia Pires and Leonardo Mouramateus
Vando Vulgo Vedita
BRA, 22’, 2017

 

Madalena Fragoso and Margarida Meneses
A Casa e os Cães
PT, 62’, 2019

Marcelo Tavares
Tu. Tu. Tu.
PT, 12’, 2019

 

Book launch:
“Musonautas, Visões & Avarias
1960-2010: 5 décadas de inquietação musical no Porto”

Concerts by:
Volúpia Mundana
+
João Loureiro, Ana Deus and Rui Fernandes
(BAN)

The American artist, writer, and curator Dan Graham will talk about his wide artistic practice with the curator and art historian Pedro de Llano, according to whom: “talking with Dan Graham is a fascinating experience The themes and ideas continue as a roller coaster and his comments surprise and provoke reflection. Sometimes it is difficult to understand whether he is serious, or even if he is using sarcasm or praise - or both at the same time (…) We are anxious to return to the conversation, continuing to learn from one of the greatest artists of our time and know, for example, what he thinks of the new building designed by Álvaro Siza in his city or the last album of his friend Kim Gordon, among many other things”.

Contemporary architecture, among many other things, is a prolonged and precise logistical exercise in value re-arrangement to maximise profit. The processes that produce our built environment are typically systematised, formal and strictly hierarchical, structures well-suited to social division. Working cooperatively offers an alternative, where there is a real possibility for mutual solidarity and engagement with people’s knowledge and experience. But how to work cooperatively on the city, when the structures which generate and govern it are based on an almost diametrically opposed logic?

Assemble and a small set of their friends, collaborators and accomplices invite the participantsto join them for four days of working together. Basing each day on a set of short readings and sustained bodily and material processes, working together will be used as a space for opening up discussion on the shared ideas, preoccupations and concerns that have been coursing through the undercurrents of Assemble’s working practice over the last ten years.

With the “poetics of the relationship” as one of its central concepts, the 34th Bienal of São Paulo — "Faz escuro mas eu canto" — adopts an innovative format, expanding in space and time. The next edition of the Biennale, in 2020, is marked by the meeting and mutual enhancement of curatorial projects and institutional action, and involves the holding of exhibitions and actions presented at the Biennale’s Pavilion in articulation with a network of more than 20 institutions in São Paulo.

The conversation will be chaired by the curator Marta Mestre and is part of a set of presentations of the project of the 34th Bienal de São Paulo in international institutions.

© Renato Cruz Santos

 

 © José Carlos Duarte

 As part of Fórum do Futuro 2019

© Marc Domage

© Renato Cruz Santos

 

© Dennis Yenmez

© Lucas Fester 

 

© Renato Cruz Santos

Post-Nostalgic Knowings is a course on culture and critical thinking which aims to look at different places in Europe which contain collective stories in disappearance, scanning the potency of recent curatorial and artistic research and intervention. The course presents a variety of “post-nostalgic” approaches by authors addressing places in Ukraine, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Spain, to understand how contemporary knowings allow for reading, intervening and may contribute to re-signify those places, whether in its relation to past memories and, most specially, as redefining new contemporary narratives. Trying to overcome the strictly preservationist and conservative approaches, the course will focus on a specific location in Porto, the Freixo hillside, characterized by the simultaneity of industrial history and the current pressure of real estate interests on the buildings and the land. The program includes conferences, debate sessions, along derives, workshops and other spatial strategies to understand and dialogue with the complexity at stake.

 

Conversation DORA GARCÍA and MARIA TRABULO
In partnership
'Times of Contemporaneity 2 – Decolonizing Culture'
curated by CLAIRE BISHOP and NUNO CRESPO
(Colectivos Pláka)

Dora García is a Spanish artist based in Barcelona, known for her research-based archives, videos, and performances. García is currently researching Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952), revolutionary socialist and the only woman in the Soviet government, who also proposed a theory of revolutionary sexuality. García is preparing a film that traces Kollontai’s influence on Third World, Chicano and Black feminisms.

....

Leitura
'AN ASSEMBLY IN THE DESERT'
Three characters argue on the best governing system to be adopted in their land, following the death of their king. Inspired in an Herodotus passage (Histories, 440 BC).

 

 

Performance by JEREMIAH DAY
followed by conversation with MARIA TRABULO

Jeremiah Day’s personal and idiosyncratic performances bring together the forms of the slide-show, the tradition of the bard, and the focus on the body as working material drawn from post-modern dance. Emerging from research into the work of Hannah Arendt and in particular her widely ignored affirmative argument for council democracy, as elaborated by the writer and activist Fred Dewey, the performance with slide shows depicts key sites of Istanbul and New England.

In a way, through the intervention, Ana Kun is shadowing Maria Trabulo, she’s making an imperfect copy of her gesture: Maria Trabulo went to Tehran and talked to people about an art collection she didn't get to experience first hand, and Ana Kun is now planning a response by reading descriptions of contributors' artworks. In her mind she is constructing this fictitious setting which is a pale reflection of Maria Trabulo’s setting, in the effort to make a prelude to it, to ease the viewer in this antechamber which is the staircase (a fringe-like space which breaks the suspension of disbelief and acts like a palate cleanser between two shows). Whimsical! 

STATUES OF TEHRAN
Documentário, 60' 

Statues of Tehran interrogates the function of monuments in today’s Tehran, an ideology-ridden postmodern megalopolis, afflicted with forgetfulness. It tracks the fate of two important public sculptures, the first, a pioneering work commissioned by the royal family in the 1970s, of then foremost modern sculptor Bahman Mohassess; the second a tribute to the Islamic Revolution standing in Revolution Square, by Iraj Esskandari. Under the aegis of the revolution, the first was destined for neglect and eventually storage, while the second became a landmark in the city’s myriad public projects celebrating the revolution and the Iran-Iraq War.

 

 

Joana Machado
Joaquim Durães
José Maia
Miguel Flor
Rita Castro Neves

Garcia da Selva & Mafalda Santos
Berrante — Xavier Paes
Sereias
DJ Urânio & MC Sissi

Joana Machado
Joaquim Durães
José Maia
Miguel Flor
Rita Castro Neves

ÁGUA FORTE
Mónica Baptista
2018, PT, 15', M/12

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

17h Book Launch

18h Session with Fernanda Bernardo

21h Session with Isabel Soveral 

Tour with the curators
Paulo Vinhas, Hugo Oliveira, Manuel João Neto, Pedro Junqueira Maia, Pedro Tenreiro, Suzana Ralha

“Da Caos à X. 

16h Guided Tour with Sofia Lemos

Premiere  “Estudos Incomunicantes”, de Álvaro Salazar

Directed by de Bruno Nacarato

Produced by Atelier de Composição

Tour with the curators
Paulo Vinhas, Hugo Oliveira, Manuel João Neto, Pedro Junqueira Maia, Pedro Tenreiro, Suzana Ralha

Talk with Her

“Do anarquismo musical aos GNR”

Inês Meneses talks with Alexandre Soares, Rui Reininho e Silvestre Pestana

16h Guided Tour by Musa paradisiaca

18h Session with Filipa Ramos

19h Session without António Poppe

 

Concert with works by:

"The exhibition 'Yesterday Died today, Today Will Die Tomorrow' is an attempt to build something solid, to counter fluidity and initiate some memory of the present and past that might generate echoes and affirm our ability to act, make, map, contribute to the collective while never loosing our singularity, which is the greatest wealth. There are several people involved in this project for the Galeria Municipal and as many ways of seeing and looking at Porto or its nightlife." 

"At these crossroads of memory I often wander into the territory of a very particular epoch: the late 1970s. Everything revolves around an indistinct magma in which proletarians and intellectuals were the protagonists of radical paradigm shifts in the reception and dispersal of music in culture. I glimpse the characters that frequented Brooklyn’s clubs replicating inaccessible modes of Studio 54, realizing the dream of liberation together with their more roly-poly, less sophisticated, cocaine-head female companions. They are my disco-punks. The power is not destructive and nihilistic, it is returned in weekend-perfected dance steps. Saturday Night Fever and Bee Gees’ music is the most engaging scenario of the old myth of the empowerment of the American mechanic, with his unique work ethics. Staying Alive is the other side of the mirror (sprinkled with less white dust) of one of the very first dance experiences that opens the doors to techno and its by-products: the eight-minute version of Donna Summer’s I Feel Love produced by Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte. The unionist revolution choreographed with synchronized hip movements from Saturday night fever breaks away from the hedonist cynicism of those who had managed to squeeze through door number 254 of Manhattan’s 54th street. All of this in 1977. At the other extreme, punk detonated with unexpected violence and speed. Like a bomb releasing contradictory, hyper-fast, guaranteed-penetration bits of shrapnel. A bomb manipulated by an increasing intellectualization, which I cannot but blame on Malcom McLaren (but this is just my totally subjective and irrational intuition). All of this is… strange.
And nevertheless… this intellectualization of punk and post-punk music, which was made of pure energy and contradictory gestures, has for protagonists a long series of actors whose background was, precisely, the art world. Proletarians of image or intellectuals of form?"

 

 

 

Through a low-resolution séance mediated by Game Boy links Riccardo Balli is going to evoke the spirit of corpse reviver Giovanni Aldini (1762 – 1834), credited with having inspired ‘Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus’. Aldini is going to tell a compressed version of the original Frankenstein story, exposing its language to retro-gaming jargon and simplifying the plot as if it were an arcade game. The aforementioned 18th-century electrifier was the nephew of eminent scientist Luigi Galvani, who lived in MIDIevil Bologna just like the author of this performance.

 

‘Dust and Shadows’ is an impassioned word based performance by Lydia Lunch, illustrated by an evocative multimedia presentation utilizing images captured and mixed live by Elise Passavant. Psycho ambient soundscapes further the dynamic musicality of Lydia Lunch’s lyrical poetry and hypnotic voice. ‘Dust and Shadows’ is a unique combination of otherworldly textures, images and sound, which deal lyrically with loss, love, rage and survival through the haunting images of the numerous ghost towns littered throughout the Spanish desert.

Presented by Margarida Mendes

 

 

The Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize, created by the Municipality of Porto in 2015 as a tribute to the former Councillor for Culture, Paulo Cunha e Silva, is a project aimed at artists under 40 who have held no more than one solo exhibition in an 'internationally renowned institution' or art space. The jury – which in the first edition was comprised by João Laia, Vicente Todolí, Meg Stuart and Julião Sarmento – analysed the portfolios presented by 47 artists, selected by a group of 16 curators, nominated by the four jurors. This exhibition will present works by the Prize’s six finalists – Christine Sun Kim, Jonathas de Andrade, June Crespo, Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela, Naufus Ramírez Figueroa and Olga Balema. 

Free entry

© Ricardo Castelo / Fundação EDP

 © Ricardo Castelo / Fundação EDP

 
© Ricardo Castelo / Fundação EDP

Free entry

© Ricardo Castelo / Fundação EDP

Free entry

Free entry

© Ricardo Castelo / Fundação EDP

Free entry

© Ricardo Castelo / Fundação EDP

 

OPENING:

Following the EDP Foundation’s acquisition of the Cabrita Reis Collection in 2015, the Galeria Municipal do Porto, in collaboration with the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) presents the most comprehensive exhibition to date of this collection. Germinal will focus on a vast and significant set of works that have been acquired by the artist Cabrita Reis over the last three decades, with special focus on the early or founding years of leading Portuguese artists who have affirmed their careers over time. With a broad and solid representation of the so‑called ‘Nineties generation’, complemented by artists from earlier and later generations, the exhibition aims to introduce spectators to a set of remarkable works and reveal the gaze of an attentive and dedicated collector, with close ties to artists and experimental practices, reflecting cosmopolitanism, edginess and a firm commitment to the future.

In this workshop, we will map ideas about the exhibition by registring the languages ​​of the artworks and its connections with sound, movement and image.

Between finitude and accumulation, memory and utility, the practice of collecting develops around the possibility of a relation between the present and the future. In discussion with three voices behind important national collections we unpack reflections fundamental to the act of collecting.

Did you know that some artists use blue as narrative to express their emotions and sensations? In this workshop, we will collect ideas about the colour blue and its meanings. We will think about the blue lighting in the exhibition and get to know through its history the works on view. Are the artworks blue? Is our body blue?

How does love arise? What drives war? Can we imagine these two seperate worlds via through glue and drawing? What is 10 000 years later between Venus and Mars? In this workshop we will value the title of the exhibition and draw up a game board where participants will build these two worlds.

What ways does sound travel in the exhibition gallery? What journeys does it draw? In this workshop, we will hands-on travel with the sound and make an imaginary exhibition made of plasticine scultpures composed of the rhythms we capture with our eyes and our ears.

 

Contemporary architecture, among many other things, is a prolonged and precise logistical exercise in value re-arrangement to maximise profit. The processes that produce our built environment are typically systematised, formal and strictly hierarchical, structures well-suited to social division and control. Working cooperatively offers an alternative, where there is a real possibility for mutual solidarity and engagement with people’s

On November 14, Saturday, the Galeria Municipal do Porto organizes a talk with Margarida Mendes (jury member of the 2nd edition of the Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize) and the winning artist.