Astray

Galeria Municipal do Porto and Kunsthalle Lissabon present Astray, a two-part project by Caroline Mesquita and the first time the work of the French artist is exhibited in Portugal.

Curated by Sofia Lemos and developed specifically for the space of Galeria Municipal, the new exhibition combines sculpture and moving image, converting it into a temporary museum for aesthetic uncertainty.

Mesquita has previously staged situations in which oxidized brass figures coinhabit different scenes with visitors, such as a celebration or an airplane crash. In this project, the artist’s interest in the body focuses inwards, in that which supports movement and articulation. For vertebrates this is the possibility of displacement offered by bone structures; in machines, it is the materiality of travel through spatial and timescales and the invention of History. These airplanes, spaceships and motorcycles, all journey in the direction of radical imagination. At Galeria Municipal, Mesquita creates an engine capable of moving through synchronic and diachronic histories of existence and questions its fabrication, both materially and symbolically. The film Astray that lends the title to the exhibition, collates human and nonhuman animals, engines and machines, in a performative relation between the viewer’s past, present and future.

Photography: Dinis Santos