Galeria Municipal do Porto

Compulsive Desires:
On Lithium Extractiuon and Rebellious Mountains
25.03 - 28.05.2023

Compulsive Desires — The Extraction of Lithium 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.

Curated by Marina Otero Verzier

With

Amável Antão, Anastasia Kubrak, Carlos Irijalba, Giuliana Rosso, Grupo de Investigação Territorial (Antonio del Giudice, Godofredo Enes Pereira, Jacob Bolton, Mingxin Li, Tiago Patatas), Heitor Cramez, Isidro Rodrigues, Jonas Staal & Radha D’Souza, Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, Lara Almarcegui, Leanne Wijnsma, Lithium Triangle Research Studio + Nicolas Jaar, Maarten Vanden Eynde & Edmond Musasa, Medios Libres con la Gira Zapatista, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Natalia de la Rubia Kozlowska, Orlando Vieira Francisco, Povo de Covas do Barroso & Paulo Carneiro, Susana Caló, Susana Soares Pinto, Tanguy Pitavy, Tomás Saraceno & Aerocene Foundation.

Music Between Companion Species
May - November 2023

Music between Companion Species is a series of concerts conceived and performed for and with dogs, their human companions and other more-than-human presences who may join these sessions. Inspired by Donna J. Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto and by cientific studies about dog’s preferences for sound and music, the concerts will take into account these animals’ unique sensibilities and hearing capabilities. Curated by Lovers & Lollypops.

Curated by Lovers & Lollypops

Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize
17.06-20.08.2023

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 underlines 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 Art Prize are:
Artist Ângela Ferreira, Jan van Eyck Academie Director Hicham Khalidi, and cultural programmer Tabitha Thorlu-Bandura.

With
Euridice Kala, Márilu Namoda and Luis Santos (nominated by Ângela Ferreira); Rouzbeh Akhbari, Kent Chan and Hira Nabi (nominated by Hicham Khalidi) and Maren Karlson, Malik Nashad Sharpe aka Marikiscrycrycry, and Eve Stainton (nominated by Tabitha Thorlu-Bandura).

Duet
Maria Paz and Joan Jonas
16.09 – 19.11.2023

Duet is 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, the two artists will reveal their common investigations of forms, colours and materials.

Curadoria de Filipa Ramos

The Sylvan and Harsh North
09.12.2023 – 10.03.2024

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.

Curated by Filipa Ramos and Juan Luis Toboso

Um Elefante no Palácio de Cristal 2021

The programme Um Elefante no Palácio de Cristal is based on an invitation made by the Galeria Municipal do Porto to three curators and an artistic collective for development of a public programme about the Primeira Exposição Colonial Portuguesa, held in 1934 in the Gardens of the Palácio de Cristal - whose mascot was the elephant, which at the time was materialised in porcelain souvenirs and a majestic sculpture placed on top of the Palácio de Cristal.

Unearthing historical visions and vestiges, this programmatic axis proposes to revisit the event and expose its implications for the contemporary era, through three sub-themes:

Ética do Olhar e da Representação raises questions about visual literacy, focusing on the problem of 'who looks at who', 'where do they look from' and 'how do they look', commencing with the existing visual records of the First Portuguese Colonial Exhibition to move towards a critical reflection orientated via contemporary perspectives.

Colonialismo, Capitalismo e Religião evokes the relationship between political, economic and ideological power, exploring themes such as material and production relations, colonial mining policy, slavery, forced labour and the Statute of Indigenous People.

Encenação do Império Colonial conducts a historical-political analysis of this and other colonial exhibitions and their reflections in current memory and the urban space.

A programme of sessions is proposed within each sub-theme for the general public and schools, which includes debates, film screenings, workshops and courses, guided by researchers and artists.

The curatorship is by Alexandra Balona, Melissa Rodrigues and Nuno Coelho and has the participation of InterStruct Collective.