Now Reading: Before the Lights Go Out: A Summer Gallery Trail Through Lisbon
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Before the Lights Go Out: A Summer Gallery Trail Through Lisbon
A woman written out of her own story—described only through the mouths of men who fear her. Shakespeare’s Sycorax never appears on stage, yet her absence shapes the entire plot of The Tempest. It is precisely this kind of erasure that artist Alice Geirinhas has spent four decades dismantling.
At the Galeria PeP inside MNAC–Museu do Chiado, Geirinhas’s Sycorax (until 20 September) restores the witch-mother to physical form: twelve large-scale drawings that borrow the stark contrasts and moralising symbolism of medieval woodcuts on witch hunts, turning persecution imagery back against itself. Curated by Lúcia Saldanha and Rui Afonso Santos, the installation gives Sycorax “body, gesture, and territory,” as Geirinhas puts it—agency reclaimed through line and ink.
But Geirinhas is also mapping a broader summer trail through Lisbon’s galleries, and some of those doors will not reopen. In Alvalade, Galeria Vera Cortês—after more than twenty years championing contemporary art in Portugal—will close permanently on 19 December. Its current show, The Narrative Structure (until 5 September), pairs two rarely exhibited works by the late Ana Vieira: Mesa-Paisagem (1973) and the Close-Up series (2004), explorations of domestic space, memory, and the politics of looking. Curated by Antonia Gaeta, this may be the last chance to encounter them in the gallery that fought to keep such work visible.
Elsewhere, MUDE hosts Autocolante: Iconografia da Liberdade (until 30 August), drawing on the Associação Cultural Ephemera archive to trace five decades of Portuguese political history through stickers—the most disposable of graphic objects, pressed into service as tools of revolution. Geirinhas told Agenda Cultural de Lisboa the show is “beautiful, extraordinary”—a revisitation of revolution and transformation “through the sticker, a graphic object seen as ephemeral and disposable.”
At Galeria Zé dos Bois, a Paulo Bruscky retrospective (until 31 August) surveys the Brazilian conceptual artist’s experiments with visual poetry, mail art, and photocopying since the 1970s. “A charm,” says Geirinhas simply.
Four shows, three neighbourhoods, one summer. Some of these spaces will not survive it.
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