CUVETE'17: An Overview
Isabel Guardado
(Translation)
Snow Cannon’s collective art exhibition, with the participation of ten artists of different nationalities, presents a great diversity of concepts and mediums. However, after a closer look, one can perceive a common thread between them all: time.
André Almeida Rodrigues’ Alfaião is a documentary that tells us of a time that passes slowly in the village where ‘the watch hands seem lazy.’ The time to sow, to make the sausages, to reap... a life governed by the year’s seasons.
Alfaião is a contemplative portrait of the daily routine of a village. A portrait that exalts the everyday and simple aspects of life.’
In Gil Zablodovsky's Sketches of Tel Aviv, on a poem by Lali Tsipi Michaeli, time runs faster. Tel Aviv's fast-moving images contrast with the repeated image of the woman waiting at the roadside.
Such accelerated time is captured in frames in the work of Francisca Sousa, From painting to Action ‘As if we were dealing with film stills (...) The painting tries, thus, to relate to the new forms of art, with the artist's body in motion and with the assertion of the ephemeral.’
An ephemeral that makes it possible to alienate and to manipulate. Ana Rita Canhão’s sculpture The Hollow Men deals with a time of alienation. Men are empty heads ready to receive the ideas of a leader, becoming a vehicle of endless and uncritical transmission. The audio Have You Not Heard? reinforces this concept through excerpts of propaganda speeches from various dictatorships, which in their own time were viral.
This manipulation can also be done through images, presumably with the endorsement of science. For CE-1, Anne Braun staged UFO sightings and photographed them, mixing up invented texts and scientific information, thus questioning the role of photography as irrefutable proof.
Never has man been confronted with so much information, it is up to him to distinguish the true from the false, an increasingly difficult task in the vortex of our time.