Tacita Dean / Maria Hassabi: Staged (2016)? - Undressed / Juliana Huxtable: Triptych

Tacita Dean
The work of this renowned British-European artist forms part of the history of Serralves’ programming, which began with a solo exhibition here in 2002 and where later she filmed her work Boots (2003) in the Casa Rosa. Several works are also included in the Museum Collection. Her 2019 exhibition is an exciting opportunity for her to show Boots, which was acquired by the Museum, alongside her new ambitious film project Antigone (2018), which premiered in the Royal Academy of Arts in her trilogy of exhibitions that also took place at the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery in London. Antigone has been many years in the making and the ideas have manifested in other works over the past three decades, most significantly with Boots. This double-screen 35 mm one-hour film is an epic exploration of the artist’s sister’s name Antigone, which features poet and playwright Anne Carson and actor Stephen Dillane. The film project evokes the eponymous mythological figure and her blind and lame father, Oedipus. It is with great pleasure that Serralves Museum has been able to unite a series of early works that manifest the early thinking behind Antigone. Alongside these works, we are pleased to be able to show two of her most recent large-scale blackboard drawings and a multi-part photogravure from our Collection.

Concept: Tacita Dean and Marta Moreira de Almeida

Maria Hassabi - Staged? (2016) - Undressed
Staged? (2016) furthers artist and choreographer Maria Hassabi’s conversation on the expectations of viewership. The work takes its time and asks the viewer to do the same, using slowness and stillness as techniques in a choreography that oscillates between dance and sculpture, subject and object, live body and still image. The audience surrounds four performers entangled in a tense and colorful pile. Beneath a sculpture, the performers pass over and through each other, forming an amorphous sculptural mass that changes through the accumulation of their sustained movements, creating a surreal theatrical intensity. At the Serralves Museum the “undressed” iteration is presented. An adaptation for public spaces represented solely by its performers and removed from all its theatrical elements.

Juliana Huxtable: Triptych
Juliana Huxtable is a writer, poet, multimedia artist, DJ and LGBT activist. Her works explore the intersections of race, gender, queerness and identity through a vast range of artistic expression. At Serralves, she presents Triptych, a performance for electronics, voice, harp, drums and video. Triptych is an assemblage of sounds rooted in Huxtable’s workshopping with frequent collaborator Joe Heffernan and Detroit-based harpist Ahya Simone.

About Serralves
The Serralves Museum of Contemporary is the foremost museum for contemporary art in Portugal, and one of Europe’s most renowned institutions for contemporary art and culture. Uniquely sited on the grounds of the Serralves Foundation, which also comprises a park and the Serralves Villa, a landmark Art Deco building, the museum designed by Álvaro Siza opened in 1999. Through its exhibitions, collection, publications, performing arts, and public programmes, the museum fosters the understanding and appreciation of contemporary art and culture in Portugal and around the world.