EDP Foundation

Tension & Conflict
Video Art after 2008

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Ten years ago, the world endured the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression of 1929. The conflict and instability that ensued was often at the core of cultural discussions, and has led to increasing debates around the politicization of art. Over this period, video has also become an ever-more indispensable resource for art to offer us a critical expression of the tensions and disquiet permeating our society today. After a period of experimentation starting in the 1960s, the ability of this medium to create and disseminate images, voices and stories has made it a crucial tool for contemporary artists to record the socioeconomic impact of everyday events.

Tension & Conflict — Video Art after 2008 focusses on an exceptional selection of artistic representations which, with unusual eloquence, have resorted to video and the moving image as a means of probing into the impact and effects of the 2008 global financial crisis. The second international group show at Museum of Art Architecture and Technology’s new galleries, this initiative gathers the works by 22 artists from the United States to Latin America, to Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

Videos, films and installations create a variety of filmic settings at MAAT’s Main Gallery and Video Room, offering personal views on the outcomes of the 2008 great recession, the associated political turmoil and the less visible social consequences of those events. Making use of memories, demonstrations and daily news, but also fictions, performances and varied genres, the artists in the show refuse passivity and make us read recent history – and the changes taking place in the present – in often unexpected ways. The exhibition includes works by Patrícia Almeida, Halil Altindere, Marilá Dardot, Bofa da Cara, Burak Delier, Melanie Gilligan, Lola Gonzàlez, Hiwa K, Silvia Kolbowski, Nikolaj Bendix, Skyum Larsen, Marc Larré, Jorge Macchi, Paulo Mendes, Mario Pfeifer, Francisco Queirós, Anatoly Shuravlev, Federico Solmi, Pilvi Takala, Maria Trabulo, Dragana Zarevac, Artur Zmijewski, Yorgos Zois.

Curated by Pedro Gadanho & Luísa Santos | September 13, 2017 — March 19, 2018

Tension & Conflict – Video Art after 2008 associated conferences

On December 4 and 5, the two-day 4Cs Lisbon Conference – Conviviality and the Institutional, co-organized with The Lisbon Consortium, presents a series of institutional practices geared towards local communities faced with conflict situations. It includes keynote speakers such as Miguel Amado (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK), Michaela Crimmin (Royal College of Art, UK), Katerina Gregos, (1st Riga Biennial Chief Curator, LVA), João Ribas (Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, PT) and Jonas Staal (Artist, NL).

On December 14, MAAT presents De-Colonizing Knowledge, a talk with Bonaventure Ndikung & Paul Goodwin, co-organized by Monica Miranda / Hangar Research Programme. This talk deals with how the production of knowledge in art and curating needs to be decolonized vis-à-vis south and north geographical divisions.

Special commission by sound artist Bill Fontana and other shows this fall at MAAT

The Fall season at MAAT continues with the celebration of the 1st anniversary of its building extension. A free-access day on October 5 will allow the public to see all the new exhibitions at the museum’s two venues.

This includes the new international commission at the Museum’s OVAL Gallery by Bill Fontana, the celebrated sound artist from San Francisco. Fontana is renowned worldwide as a pioneer in artistic experimentation with sound. As he likes to say, he “captures the sound of things.” Following projects at the Tate Modern and SFMoMA, in Lisbon the artist couples, for the first time, a dynamic sound dimension with a livestreaming video component. Using seven projections, the installation shows unique views of the 25th April bridge and the river Tagus, as well as unknown angles of the shadows of vehicles moving across the bridge. As Fontana explains, the title Shadow Soundings emerged from the “moving shadows that produce the iconic ‘singing’ sound of the bridge.” During the open day anniversary programme, a special talk between artist Bill Fontana and creative producer/writer Ariane Koek, will discuss the artist’s new large scale installation.

On this occasion, exhibitions opening at MAAT’s Central building include Quote/Unquote – Between Appropriation and Dialogue, a new curatorial perspective on the EDP Foundation art collection, including works by Eduardo Batarda, Fernando Calhau, José Pedro Croft, Ângela Ferreira, Ana Jotta, Bruno Pacheco, João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva, among others; and a new edition of our international collaboration Artists’ Film International, the multi-institutional cooperation started by the Whitechapel Gallery, which this year explores the theme of “Collaboration" and includes artworks by Adrian Paci, Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva, Desire Machine Collective, Mikhail Karikis, Luís Lázaro de Matos and others.

Later, in early November, MAAT will open four new exhibitions. The Project Room will start its special program with Grada Kilomba, the Portuguese artist whose international reputation has grown from Berlin. We will also welcome Portuguese artist José Carlos Teixeira, and directly from the Whitechapel Gallery, in London, comes Electronic Superhighway—an exciting exhibition focused on how computers and the internet have impacted the art scene since the sixties. Ana Jotta, awarded with the EDP Foundation Grand Prize in 2013, presents Bonus, an exhibition set up in a space that is deliberately un-museum-like—on one of the busiest shopping streets in Belém, Rua do Embaixador—where the artist shows a selection of her recent and undiscovered works, seeking to engage with the location’s privileged architectural traits.