Past Exhibitions 2023
09.12.2023 – 10.03.2024
Sylvan Harsh North
What are the meteorological patterns, the myths and stories, the rhythms, colours and shapes, the human and nonhuman inhabitants that make up the Iberian Northwest, in its reality and fiction?
Wondering about the rituals and expressive modes of people, animals, plants, elements and minerals, we went looking for the roots, terminations and tentacles of the Iberian Northwest, trying to locate the places where they might reside. In doing so, we considered the past but above all faced the present-future of these concrete and imagined spaces between seas, woods and settlements. The Sylvan and Harsh North is an exhibition that follows roads and lines of intensity, centrifugal forces that take us beyond Porto, towards those supposed margins where permutations erupt, to discover and share the references, stories, words and connections to these places with a long past and an even longer future.
With
Alejandra Pombo Su, Cem Raios T’abram, Daniel Moreira e Rita Castro Neves, Diego Vites, Judith Adataberna, Lara e Noa Castro Lema, Lois Patiño, Mariana Barrote, Mariana Caló e Francisco Queimadela, Maruja Mallo, Óliver Laxe, Salvador Cidrás, Vicente Blanco, Von Calhau!
Curated by Filipa Ramos and Juan Luis Toboso.
16.09 – 19.11.2023
Dueto
Dueto was an invitation for two artists to share an exhibition space. It started as a proposal for a young artist from Porto to think of an artist they would like to share an exhibition with. Recalling the impact of her survey show at the Serralves Museum, Maria Paz invited Joan Jonas to share the exhibition space of the Galeria Municipal do Porto.
In this transatlantic exchange of generations, curated by Filipa Ramos, the two artists revealed their common investigations of forms, colours and materials.
17.06 — 27.08.2023
Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize
Created by the City Council as a tribute to the late Councillor for Culture Paulo Cunha e Silva (1962 – 2015), a central figure for the city’s artistic life, the award, held every two years in Porto, recognises the talent of new generations of national and international artists.
This year’s edition underlined the Prize’s commitment to fostering creation and cultural exchange by establishing a partnership with three world-recognised residency programmes: Arquipélago Centro de Artes in S. Miguel, Azores, Cove Park, on Scotland’s West Coast, and Pivô, in São Paulo, will all host one of the nominated artists, appointed by a jury of three members.
The Nominators for the 2023 edition of the Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize were: artist Ângela Ferreira, Jan van Eyck Academie Director Hicham Khalidi, and cultural programmer Tabitha Thorlu-Bangura.
The prized winners of this year's edition were:
Marilú Mapengo Námoda, was selected for the residency at Arquipélago - Centro de Artes Contemporâneas, in the Azores.
Luis M. S. Santos, selected for the Cove Park space in Scotland.
Kent Chan, who has been granted a residency at Pivô Arte e Pesquisa, in Brazil.
25.03 — 28.05 2023
Compulsive Desires - The Extraction of Lithium and Rebellious Mountains
Compulsive Desires - on Lithium Extraction and Rebellious Mountains addresses the entanglement between extractivism and exhaustion, productivity and burn-out, across scales. Curated by Marina Otero Verzier, the exhibition takes as its starting point the ongoing lithium extraction plans in the North of Portugal and the struggles sustained by local communities for their lives and rights. Battles that emphasize how, in what has been described as "green colonialism", the development of the
"renewable energy futures", too often involves the dispossession of communities and degradation of ecosystems.
Whereas the mining industry — and capitalism cravings — subjugates and exploits the mountain and its inhabitants treating them as resources to be extracted, the violence is turned into
a force for survival for these communities through collective infrastructures and embodied rituals. If mining results in social, ecological, and mental breakdown, these practices, alongside artistic expressions, break social order to create counter worlds merging the individual and the collective, the ancestral realm and future generations, the human and more-than-human, and unleashing alternative understanding of energy.
19.01 – 19.02.2023
Derivas e Criaturas — New Acquisitions from the Municipal Collection of Art
More than thirty artworks occupied the two floors of the Galeria Municipal do Porto during Derivas e Criaturas, the first exhibition of the Aquisições project, which aims to dynamize the Municipal Art Collection and enhance the artistic heritage of Porto through an annual programme of artwork acquisitions.