Galeria Municipal do Porto

We are living through an intense period in which a succession of events has caused tensions and conflicts in our societies. Recently, this difficult context has been labelled as a permanent crisis. Throughout history, similar moments have created contexts of generalised fear where it was difficult, if not impossible, to imagine multiple possibilities for the future.

However, this is not the only possible scenario: there are other ways of relating to the present in order to understand it as a phase of transition and transformation, rather than a generalised collapse. Different perspectives encourage us into bolder states of mind through which we can create imaginaries that respond to our time more creatively.

The approaches presented in this exhibition adopt open attitudes to the world, which challenge the catastrophic narratives that dominate the present and promote the emergence of multiple futures. Focusing on the now, forms of the surrounding futures aim to question the supremacy of the visions that categorise our reality, promoting stories and meanings that celebrate our shared ability to imagine and rehearse worlds to come.

Joana da Conceição’s work invites us to abandon stagnant ways of relating to the world, proposing magical approaches to the unknown. Nave Geo-Celestial is a dive into the mysterious interior of a pulsating space made of colour, light, matter and sound. This moving place brings together different animated bodies: some resemble familiar figures such as a bed, windows or a skeleton, while others are uncanny in the way they constitute permeable surfaces and suggest floating images or cosmic skies. By seeking a freed imagination, Nave Geo-Celestial projects various possibilities for perceiving reality, questioning oppositions such as self and other, interior and exterior, micro and macro, horizontal and vertical, real and virtual, abstract and figurative, light and dark or static and in motion. Here, these distinctions are replaced by a sensory demonstration of the intimate relationship between all things, materialising a celebration of the living multiplicity of the universe.

forms of the surrounding futures is an extension of the project of the same name presented at the 12th edition of the Gothenburg Biennale, curated by João Laia in 2023, and will take a hybrid form — between the collective and the individual — in two spaces of the Gallery: the works of Rodrigo Hernández, Maria Jerez, Kem, Sandra Mujinga, Luiz Roque, Outi Pieski, Ana Vaz, P. Staff and Osías Yanov will occupy Floor 0. Staff and Osías Yanov will occupy Floor 0, and an exhibition project entitled Nave Geo-Celestial, by Joana da Conceição, can be visited on Floor 1.