Galeria Municipal do Porto

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

Blues of our time

The Oficina Pedrêz installation, which occupies the courtyard in front of Galeria Municipal do Porto, consists of five benches on wheels that invite visitors to stop, look, touch and rest.

These functional sculptures, made up of an oval steel structure, have been filled with hemp and charcoal concrete, covered in a thin paste of wax and cobalt blue pigment. The colour unfolds in different shades and seems to reflect the sky, but also the world, in all its dimensions.

Oficina Pedrêz

Blues of our time

The duo behind the project, Matilde Cabral and Francisco Fonseca, conceived the different blues according to multiple meanings: from the ideas of Louis Kahn when who said that "a square is nothing more than a façade facing the sky", to the reference to the blue objects that, inexplicably, resisted the fires in Maui, Hawaii; one can even recognise on those surfaces the continental masses and oceans that permeate the planet.

Oficina Pedrêz is an experimental architecture studio in the fields of material research and human ecologies. It was founded by the fashion designer Matilde Cabral and the architect Francisco Fonseca in 2020, following the fusion of the “Porto Fashion Office” development studio and the “Skrei” experimental architecture office. Pedrêz takes its name from a breed of chicken native to northern Portugal and Cantabria – the pedrês chicken – in recognition of its fundamental role in the human and urban ecology of these regions. Pedrêz is an integrative architecture workshop, with a particular focus on architectural devices and self-built projects, bringing together various lines of applied research, such as cultivable building materials and the development of self-sufficient domestic infrastructures.

A project commissioned by Galeria Municipal do Porto / Ágora – Cultura e Desporto, do Porto E.M., S.A.