Jogo do Sério [Staring Contest] #4

Work of art seeks work of art for Staring Contest — an open call for Museu occupation.

As we learned when we were kids, in a staring contest, one cannot smile, blink or even look away. All those things are subjected to the ultimate penalty: defeat. When two bodies face each other in a Staring Contest, the tension between them is too evident. There is no place for compromise.

In this curatorial project, we ask the artistic community (and beyond) to suggest one or more objects that can be partnered up with the exhibited work.

In this fourth moment, from February 24^th to October 6^th, a partner was sought for Ângela Ferreira’s Hotel da Praia Grande (O Estado das Coisas).

After the deliberation of the jury, the fourth Staring Contest features a work by F&G, in response to the already announced work by Ángela Ferreira. The relationship between État d’urgence (state of emergency) and Hotel da Praia Grande (O Estado das Coisas) seemed to the jury to be the most appropriate, taking into account the curatorial assumption, despite the quality of the various proposals submitted.

Let’s play a Staring Contest. One body facing another. They must stare at each other. Whoever smiles, looks away or blinks loses. To be still, but not motionless: the play is on as it games on lethargy. A contribution to a symmetry of intentions, broken by the asymmetry on the surface.

Daniel Madeira

Ângela Ferreira, born in 1958 in Maputo, Mozambique, grew up in South Africa and obtained her MFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.
She lives and works in Lisbon, teaching Fine Art at Lisbon University, where she obtained her doctorate in 2016. Ferreira’s work is concerned with the ongoing impact of colonialism and post-colonialism on contemporary society, an investigation that is conducted throught in-depth research and distillation of ideias into concise and resonant forms. She represented Portugal at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, continuing her investigations into the ways in which European modernism to adapted or failed to adapt to the realities of the African continent by tracing the history of Jean Prouvé’s’ Maison Tropicale’. Architecture also serves as a starting point for the deepening of her long research on the erasure of colonial memory and the refusal of reparation, which finds its most complex materialization in A Tendency to Forget (2015) focusing on ethnographic work of the couple Jorge and Margot Dias. The Pan African Unity Mural (2018), exhibited at the Maat Museum Lisbon and Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden was conceived, retrospectively and introspectively, for the “here” and the “now”. In addition to its own trajectory, other biographical stories are simultaneously narrated, exposed and hidden in this work. In Dalaba: Sol d’Exil (2019) a work focused on Miriam Makeba, one of the most prominent figures in the struggle against apartheid, Ferreira created sculptural pieces based on the architectural elements of the exile building where Makeba lived in Conakri, almost like a prototype of the relationship between modernist and African vernacular architectures. Her sculptural, sound and videographic homages have continuously referenced economic, political and cultural history of the African continent whilst recuperating the work and image of unexpected figures like Peter Blum, Carlos Cardoso, Ingrid Jonker, Jimi Hendrix, Jorge Ben Jor, Jorge dos Santos, Diego Rivera or Miriam Makeba.

angelaferreira.info

Born in the South of France where she and he currently live, F&G define themselves as Mediterranean. Associate professors and artists, this duo asserts an informative approach of art in which everyone takes part and finds one’s place. Their personal stories have led them to travel to Europe, North Africa and Canada. For several years she and he have maintained privileged links with Portugal where the duo exhibited for the first time in 2021 during the Mostra Internacional de Arte Contemporânea ART’IN LIMA. Aware of the evolutions of our society and its complexity, the artists touch upon subject matters that society endures and that put it on edge. Witnesses of their time, she and he seek to conserve, through their works, traces of both unique and common stories and at the same time involve their audiences. Among institutional or urban spaces, F&G carry out installations, happenings or performances in order to question the heaviness of politics, flaws in our society, and injuries inflicted on the living. Their approach mixes adult reality with the innocence of substances that satirically set out issues to defend. Socially committed and personally concerned by the subjects they take up, the artistic duo advocates an activist artistic process.

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