Une communauté imaginée

For this 33rd edition of the International Workshops, the Frac honors Portuguese artists, under the curatorship of Miguel Amado!

The connection between art, politics, and territory is usually at the core of residencies and exhibitions that showcase artists in a country other than their own. This type of project can be seen as an instrument of nation building, with the works made by the artists and/or on display attempting to embody their country’s identity. But a country is an “imagined community,” as the theorist Benedict Anderson puts it, and thus any such project must take into consideration that national identities are contingent by nature.

The selected artists belong to four different generations, although all have emerged in the last twenty-five years. Some have a more conceptual practice, others a more sensorial approach; some focus on subject matter, others explore form. All use a variety of media, including installation, film, photography, sculpture, and writing. For some, the narratives and symbols associated with Portugal or the Portuguese context—whether the social fabric or the landscape—are deeply relevant to their work. For others, those elements are only a starting point or a background. Their lines of inquiry center on representation—that which enables a person to identify herself, himself, or theirself with the other, establishing (or not) an intellectual, physical, emotional, and spiritual connection.