Con(fine)arts | FBAUL Gallery

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

Exhibition at the Gallery of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon (2021)

Confinement, quarantine, isolation, security measures, distancing, restrictions, respiratory hygiene: these were some of the concepts that we had to welcome to our daily lives and yet it still is confusing to reflect on their impact. We’ve learned to create space between bodies, fearing the touch, to not be present, and so a new normality emerged.

Con(fine)arts gathers a small selection of artworks created at Cultivamos Cultura during atypical times, which demonstrate some examples of how these new rituals have propagated to our collective imagination – Adam Zaretsky invites us to look at human form, questioning its evolutionary unfolding: Which came first, the genitals or the face? Dalila Honorato, Isabel Burr Raty, Karolina Żyniewicz, Louise Mackenzie, Pavel Tavares and Robertina Šebjanič to travel to a dystopian future where we have to be systematically decontaminated to access shared artistic productions and spaces; Kim Doan Quoc assimilates the idea of extinction and presents climate scenarios as alarming as apocalyptic; FEMeeting found a refuge on the Moon, reaching it through an interference that is reflected and immediately sent back to Earth, where Pavel Tavares imagines zygotes and gametes floating in a sea of plastic and waste. At Summer School new worlds are created from the curious gaze that doesn’t keep up with the present, selecting small mementos from the past. In a new space, nurtured by future prosperity, we wait for them to develop, maybe inside of a Petri dish, surrounded by fungi and bacteria.