-------------------------------------------------------

-------------------------------------------------------

Baginski Galeria/Projectos presents 'Under Fire' an exhibition organized by its artist André Romão, with works by Ana Manso, Anthony McCall, José de Almada Negreiros, Kajsa Dahlberg (in collaboration wiyh Gritt Uldall-Jessen) and also ceramics by Bay Keramik, Jasba, Jopeko, Jürgel Keramik, Ruscha Keramische Werke, Scheurich, Strehla Keramik, VEB Haldensleben, among others.

The exhibition is centred on the idea of 'work' in its widest range of meaning, from the idea of invisible labour, to fordist production and creative models.

This group of objects were chosen for their potentiality to reflect on what may have constituted a certain abstract idea of 'work' or 'work as production' in the 20th century. Such a definition shaped the ... social and creative context of the past century, being a major force capable of re-defining everything else around it. From this point on we can inquire what may be transported or transformed into the next decades.

The show puts together an broad group of works, allowing the public to intercept synapses in the relations between objects rather than trying to pin-down major historical guidelines. All works presented hold an inner dichotomy around this idea, testifying the difficulty to grasp the subject as a whole.

The core of the exhibition is a group of both East and West German Ceramic produced between the 1950's and the 1970's by factories as Ruscha Keramische Werke, Scheurich, Strehla Keramik or VEB Haldensleben.

These factories shaped mass-produced decorative objects and even though the shapes were produced industrially, the workers decorated the vases individually. Such process aimed to create affordable works of created a 'bug' in an otherwise fordist production system, allowing a certain amount of creative freedom within the production lines.

Ana Manso (born Lisbon 1984, lives and works in Lisbon) will be creating the display for the ceramic collection. Contrasting with the production of pottery, paintings ultimately reclaim themselves as the place for the free-flowing creation of subjectivity. Ana Manso's work is deeply concerned with an itntensity of the gesture and the possibility of creating wordless meaning, vibration. Unlike the glaze on the German vases shown, Her paintings have no program, no utility, they embody a certain form of resistance to the idea of productivity, knowledge, reproduction and translation.

A drawing by José de Almada Negreiros (born São Tomé and Principe 1893, died in Lisbon in 1970) is also presented in the show. 'Cupid and psyche' is a preparatory study for a decorative stained glass window for a private house in Lisbon built circa 1950.

Anthony McCall (born St. Paul's Cray 1946, lives and works in New York) presents the film documentation of the 1972 performance 'Landscape for Fire', in which a group of people light fire in a grid pattern in a landscape. This work testifies the questioning of the object that took place in the 1960's and 70's and it s strategies of circulation and visibility as a parallel to production itself. Though constructed in a very systematic way, the referential and metaphorical potential of the performance goes further than a conceptual experiment and deconstruction.

Kajsa Dallberg (born Göteborg 1973, lives and works in Berlin) will be showing the book and the documentation of its reading entitled 'In Godot's Waiting Room' (a project in collaboration with Gritt Uldall-Jessen) in which the artist proposes an overlapping of two narratives in the form of a theatre play: Samuel Beckett's 'waiting for Godot' and the 1983 Women's House occupation in Umeå, Sweden.

The play narrates the juxtaposition of two opposite typologies of wait: Godot's rather metaphysical and the women's waiting for the authorities to claim back the house they occupied for the creation of a community, placing their wait in a social realm.

Acknowledging that the show is just a comment, a 'partial truth' around this subject-matter, but nonetheless hoping that the juxtaposing of such content may produce something external to its parts, transforming objects into fields of meaning that can work together or clash.

Acknowledgements: The artists, João Esteves de Oliveira, Galeria Luciana Brito, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Nuno da Luz.