RESCUE OP

Rescue Op, curated by Katherine Sirois, is an initiative of P28 - Association for Creative and Artistic Development, in partnership with Carpe Diem Art and Research Association, and presents works by artists from Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, and Brazil.

 

The artists in this show use all kinds of everyday materials (found objects, fragments and garbage) to produce works and installations that interweave contemporary and globalization with traditional African craftsmanship and aesthetics. Visitors will be able to learn about the importance and usefulness of discarded (or useless) things for the processes of artistic creativity, while encouraging their own initiative, imagination and resourcefulness in participating in the environmental challenges of our societies.

 

Sifting, collecting, storing, re-imagining, converting and assembling. These are the main exercises artists perform from waste, trash and junk, or simple, humble and worthless materials. The raw material for these works results from a process of selection and collection while wandering in urban centers or in the peripheries of big cities to capture leftovers and waste, pieces and parts thrown in the streets, in vacant lots or in garbage dumps.

 

Questioning the concepts of "value" and "waste" and challenging the excesses of ruthless consumption, the artists (re)value worn-out materials, obsolete and discarded objects, while at the same time paying homage to the modesty of the humblest to the modesty of the most humble and ordinary artifacts of everyday life.

 

Rescue Op proposes a meditation on the convergence, in the visual arts (more specifically in sculpture, collage and installation), between industry, artifact and nature. In an active relationship with our time's external and material realities, the artists in their work playfully and spiritedly cultivate and transform these common and discarded objects into new visual and narrative symbols. In doing so, they reinterpret, in their own distinctive ways, the material that makes up the visual and social cultures of their native and adopted countries.

 

Pavilion 31 at CHPL / Júlio de Matos Hospital - Lisbon.