PEDRO PIRES
The International Contemporary Art Fair ARCO LISBOA 2021 runs in an online format, due to the restrictions imposed by the pandemic.
THIS IS NOT A WHITE CUBE is among the 32 participating galleries, presenting a project connecting unreleased artworks by 6 contemporary artists from Angola, São Tomé and Principe, DRC and its diaspora, which practice has consisted over the years on research and project development around the notion of memory and identity, tradition, and contemporaneity: Dagmar Van Weeghel (74, Netherlands), Francisco Vidal (78, Angola, Portugal); Nelo Teixeira (75, Angola); Patrick Bongoy (80, RDC, South Africa); Pedro Pires (78, Angola); and René Tavares (83, São Tomé e Príncipe).
Through this project the gallery aims to generate a dialogue between countries with colonial and historic affinities which reflects on the concept of decoloniality and seeks to promote a reflection on how contemporary African art has been affirming itself on a global scale. This statement has been verified either through the production of a disruptive discursive position in the context of a postcolonial debate that has remained for decades transversely marked by a certain blind Eurocentrism. A rooted theorization that stems from the processes of occupation and sharing of African territories by the colonizing peoples, which produced a unilateral reading of their influence on the cultural and artistic constitution of the colonized countries. This project was developed and curated specifically for Arco Art Fair reflects on the emergence of a critical vision of colonialism and the importance that the African diaspora - personified in these artists - the curatorial projects, researches and documental studies assume in the production of a renewal of the historical discourse of art in contemporary times.
