By Liberty, not Fear

Video program from CACE collection at MNAC

Curated by Emília Tavares and Sandra Vieira Jürgens

Night for Day, by British artist Emily Wardill, inaugurates a video program called Pela Liberdade e não por Medo (For Liberty, not Fear), produced by and in partnership with the State Contemporary Art Collection (CACE).MNAC is thus taking part in the commemorations of the 50th anniversary of the Revolution of April 25, 1974, through the eyes of artists from different generations and artistic backgrounds on one of the most remarkable and decisive moments in our contemporary history.

Night for Day is a film that combines documentary and fiction.

It brings together filial relations in a revolutionary technological environment, as well as personal testimony (through interviews with Isabel do Carmo, an anti-fascist and one of the founders of the extreme left-wing movement, Brigadas Revolucionárias), and notes of modernist utopian architecture (The triangular house in Murfacém, Trafaria, designed by the architect António Teixeira Guerra). Complementing these records with the globalizing reality of contemporary Portuguese society.

This is a work of enormous rigor and cinematographic quality, which expertly and dialectically explores Portugal's recent history, contributing to the urgent and incessant search for the meaning of democracy and freedom

Biography of the artist

Emily Wardill (1977) lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal. Her practice spans film, video, sculpture, performance, photography and installation. It has been an ongoing enquiry into the imagined image – what it is, what it has been used for and how it leaves indelible motes and shrapnel behind it. This has taken her from examples of entropy to case studies on risk detailing fires attributed to paranormal activity. It has travelled from psychoanalytical case studies on negative hallucination to memory palaces and their relationship to colourless vision. From stained glass as an early device to communicate with the illiterate right up to the filmic technique of 'day for night' - reversing it to reflect on technological vision, performed gender and imagined utopias.

Wardill’s work has been exhibited at Secession, Vienna, Gulbenkian Project Spaces, Lisbon, SMK , Copenhagen, de Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam List Centre MIT , Boston, The ICA, London , XYZ Collective Tokyo ,The Biennale of Moving Images Geneva, The Serpentine Gallery, The Hayward Gallery, MUMOK Vienna; and MOCA, Miami. She has shown in the Berlinalle Forum Expanded and the New York and London Film festivals. Her work was awarded the Jarman Award in 2010, the Leverhulme Award in 2011 and the EMAF award in 2021. She participated in the 54th Venice Biennale, the 19th Sydney Biennale and GHOST 2565 in 2022.

Some of the international collections holding Wardill's work are Tate Britain, MUMOK Vienna, Gulbenkian Art Museum, Fonds Municipal d’Art Contemporain de la Ville de Genève, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne Collection, Saastamoinen Foundation and the Arts Council Collection of Great Britain as well as numerous private collections. She is represented by Carlier Gebauer (Berlin) and Altman Siegal (San Francisco).