Exhibition view at ASHPIT8, MAAT, Lisbon – Photos by Bruno Lopes

 

Midnight presents a group of works by Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela. The exhibition is symbolically located in the transition period between night and day, in the moment in which, according to popular imaginary, the relations between different beings and worlds are porous.

At the entrance, two synchronized projections juxtapose cyanotypes of plants with animal images made from sequences captured by infrared video surveillance illuminators and later transferred to 16mm black-and-white film. The animals’ tapetum lucidum (the retroreflective membrane of the eyeball that ensures their night vision) is particularly visible in the films, which reveal the iridescent gaze of badgers, boars, bucks, cows, deer, eagle-owls, foxes, gannets, rats, weasels and wolves.

In the room to the right, a six-channel HD video installation expands the artists’ interest in the cyanotype — an analogic process of fixing images by exposing a sensitised surface to ultraviolet light. The photographic prints of natural elements result from cyanotypes that were filmed and transferred to negative. Flowers, leaves and bones become physical and temporal abstractions whose continuous movement and sound dilute the present in a timeless flow and tinge the room with deep blue. To the left, a 16mm film converges different states of a female figure whose image is divided between matter and shadow, body and mind, sleep and dream. This aerial body exists at night, in the middle of the night, through the medium of the night, where penumbra and light, silhouette and density, movement and suspension meet, moon and night sky meet.

Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela develop a multidisciplinary and multifaceted practice and make installations that combine films, videos and still images with other supports, such as drawing, painting and sculpture. Their works question the possibilities of artistic research as a methodology of knowledge production. They are situated in a space where the logical and the illogical, the empirical and the theoretical, the animal and the human, the personal and the universal are indistinguishable. Environmental concerns and the interest in the dialogue between the biological, the vernacular and the cultural are recurrent elements in their practice. 

Filipa Ramos, wall text for the exhibition Midnight at ASHPIT 8, in MAAT

 

Exhibition view at ASHPIT8, MAAT, Lisbon – Photos by Bruno Lopes

 

Midnight, Six synchronous video back-projections, 15’43” (loop), 2019 – Still frames