Program 2025

From Maurizio Cattelan's biting satire and Anne Imhof's visceral explorations of control to Filipa César's critical lens on colonial legacies, Serralves Museum’s 2025 program unites bold voices that are shaping the art world today.

Serralves Museum is excited to present its 2025 program, reaffirming its commitment to fostering far-reaching, transdisciplinary debate on our contemporary world. This year, its exhibitions and events engage artists from different geographies, generations, and fields of thought in constructive dialogue, establishing Serralves as a space where transformative artistic critique and practices resonate with the pressing issues of our time.

The program’s highlights include artists such as Avery Singer, Mounira Al Solh, Zanele Muholi, Maurizio Cattelan, Fernanda Fragateiro, Cinthia Marcelle, Anne Imhof and Filipa César. Working across different mediums—from photography, film essay, and sculpture to installation and performance—these artists, through their practice, express kindred worldviews on themes such as identity, the body, memory, and structures of power. This body—be it queer, Black, collective, or dissident—serves as a locus for resistance, while colonial legacies and strategies for control are deconstructed with unwavering, unstoppable insight.

Maurizio Cattelan, for example, challenges us with his critical vision of the grotesque comedy of power and its failures, while Anne Imhof explores the fractious relationship between the body and mechanisms of control. Mounira Al Solh depicts narratives of displacement and memory that traverse and transcend cultural and geographical borders. Meanwhile, Cinthia Marcelle examines the relationship between labor structures and social systems, all the while questioning hierarchies and modes of organization. Filipa César then revisits colonial legacies with a profoundly critical and poignantly cinematic eye. These practices, as a whole, present complex ideas that subvert convention and expand the horizons of contemporary thought.

In the summer, the international group exhibition Material Evidence will bring together artists (Aria Dean, Cameron Rowland, Nour Mobarak, P. Staff, Sara Daraedt, and Tarik Kiswanson) who explore how intentional materiality can be used to examine pressing social, cultural, historical, aesthetic, and political issues.

In architecture, the Museum’s New Wing—Álvaro Siza Wing—will host two major exhibitions. One will be dedicated to Alvar Aalto, celebrating a prolific body of work created in collaboration with Aino and Elissa Aalto, while the other will be the first-ever large-scale retrospective of the duo Aires Mateus, highlighting the impact of their practice at various Venice Biennials and other international exhibitions. These exhibitions underscore Serralves' role as a space for the celebration of architecture as a critical practice.

The Álvaro Siza Wing is also to be the setting for an unprecedented exhibition of the Duerckheim Collection, one of Europe’s most important private collections of contemporary art, recently integrated into the Serralves Collection on long-term loan. Among its highlights is Anselm Kiefer’s Dat rosa miel apibus (2010–11), a work that epitomizes Serralves’ commitment to being a worthy stage for Europe’s artistic legacy, engaging in dialogue with works by, among others, Shirin Neshat, Georg Baselitz, Theaster Gates, Cerith Wyn Evans and Sam Taylor-Johnson.

As for the performing arts, Lucinda Childs, one of the most influential names in contemporary dance, is a standout of this year’s program. Her minimalist, innovative style will be well-matched by the presence of Meredith Monk and John Hollenbeck presenting Duet Behavior, exploring the boundaries between music and movement. These highlights, alongside works by Eszter Salamon, Maria Hassabi, Tristan Perich, and Floris Vanhoof, culminate in the cycle The Museum as Performance, reaffirming the fundamental role of performance practices in the landscape of contemporary arts.

The 2025 program reflects the Serralves Foundation’s commitment to serving as a bridge for transformative ideas and artistic practices that challenge the furthest reaches of our knowledge. As we face profound historical changes, the artists involved in Serralves Museum’s program do not offer simple answers but instead invite us to contemplate, question, and engage critically with our time.