The Portuguese artist duo João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva, well known for their conceptual and poetic analyses of reality, present PAPAGAIO, their largest retrospectively conceived solo exhibition to date in Berlin. The site-specific film installation brings together over twenty short 16-mm films, taken from three central work series from the past ten years.
The exhibition architecture that rhythmizes the space visually and acoustically brings the individual works into dialog, and emphasizes the equally sensual and structural qualities of the duo's oeuvre. Each film follows the same formal guidelines: presented in slow motion, silence, and looped, the camera focuses on its object of observation from a fixed distance and angle. Precisely one single motif, sequence of movement, or activity is recorded at a time. The subject is always positioned at a pressure point between perception and reality; the motifs are drawn from found or staged everyday, biological, physical, or chemical phenomena...such as a fish's gasp for air on dry land, or an egg frying. Proceeding from a deliberately staged moment of confusion, the individual films challenge our usual perspective on a specific situation, while the installation as a whole acts to shift our view of the world.
With PAPAGAIO, Gusmão + Paiva consciously reveal their way of working; the duo depicts its fascination with the mysticism of everyday life from an analytical distance, and protocols the genesis of knowledge. In its variety, the complex artistic installation thus makes philosophical questions of existence immediately accessible. KW Institute for Contemporary Art is therefore particularly pleased to present this show to a wide Berlin audience for the first time. The exhibition was co-produced with the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan and the Camden Arts Centre in London.
João Maria Gusmão (born in 1979 in Lisbon) and Pedro Paiva (born in 1977 in Lisbon) have been working together since 2001, and have realized numerous institutional solo exhibitions, for example at MUSAC - Museo de Arte Contemporâneo de Castilla y León (León, ES, 2007), Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art (San Francisco, US, 2008), Ikon Gallery (Birmingham, GB, 2010), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf, DE, 2011), Frac Île-de-France, Le Plateau, (Paris, 2011), and Kölnischer Kunstverein (Cologne, DE, 2015). They have also taken part in group exhibitions around the world, including the Bienal de São Paulo (São Paulo, BR, 2006), the Portuguese Pavilion at the 53rd Biennale di Venezia (Venice, IT, 2009) and THE ENCYCLOPEDIC PALACE, the general exhibition at the 55th Biennale di Venezia (Venice, IT, 2013).
Entrada actualizada el el 11 nov de 2015
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