Visuality & Vision

The aim of this exhibition is to explore the ways in which a regime of visuality is implicated in an outlook on the world. Modernity constructed several different ways of approaching visual perception, and these turned out to be crucial in the ways in which the notion of the visible was envisaged. The pursuit of a rationalisation and definition of the emergence of the image occupied many of the projects of modernity. In the course of this new century, other regimes have been added, in which the ubiquity of digitisation and its global mapping—of places, things, and life in general—has come to substitute the world itself for its virtualisation, turning it into an opaque mass: non-differentiated, if not actually invisible.

Nonetheless, artistic practices have probed these regimes of the image, and the political views implicit in them. They point to a process of normative rationalisation and to a subsequent material subtraction from reality, where the space of rupture and critique has shrunk vertiginously. The works brought together in this exhibition sound the ostensible boundaries established by these regimes of visuality, pointing to the occurrence of a different envisioning of the world’s image.

Artists: Ângela Ferreira, Helena Almeida, Joaquim Bravo, José Barrias, José Luís Neto, Miguel Palma, Pedro Barateiro, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Rui Chafes