BIOGRAPHIES

Vito Acconci (1940)

The influential, provocative and often radical art-making practices of Vito Acconci have evolved from writing through conceptual art, bodyworks, performance, film, video, multimedia installation, sculpture, design and architecture. In the 1970s, he produced a remarkable body of conceptual, performance-based film and video works, in which he engages in an intensive psychodramatic dialogue between artist and viewer, body and self, public and private, subject and object. (EAI)


Anthony Ramos (1944)

Performance and media artist Anthony Ramos was among the earliest video artists to use the medium as a tool for mass media critiques and cultural documentation, and to examine media presentations of "truth." In his powerful but rarely seen video works of the 1970s, Ramos sought to combine art and activism, giving agency to marginalized individuals and communities. In his earliest black-and-white video pieces, Ramos engaged in forceful, direct performances for the camera, often using physical endurance and actions to confront political issues.
His 1977 video About Media is an incisive deconstruction of television news. It documents an interview Ramos gave to news reporter Gabe Pressman on the subject of Ramos's eighteen-month prison term for draft resistance during the Vietnam War. Ramos appropriates the interview, contrasting the unedited interview footage with the final televised news report, exposing the artifice of television news. He also interjects footage of his extraordinary and unnerving early performances, including Balloon Nose Blow-Up, which speaks to the influence of Allan Kaprow, with whom Ramos had studied and worked in California. (EAI)


Joan Jonas (1936)

An acclaimed multi-media performance artist, Joan Jonas is also a major figure in video art. From her seminal performance-based exercises of the 1970s to her later televisual narratives, Jonas' elusive theatrical portrayal of female identity is a unique and intriguing inquiry.
Trained in art history and sculpture, Jonas was a central figure in the performance art movement of the mid-1960s. In works that examined space and perceptual phenomena, she merged elements of dance, modern theater, the conventions of Japanese Noh and Kabuki theater, and the visual arts. Jonas first began using video in performance in Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy (1972), in which a live camera and monitor functioned as both a mirror and a masking device, a means of transforming and layering images, space and time. Jonas' investigation of subjectivity and objectivity is articulated through an idiosyncratic, personal vocabulary of ritualized gesture and self-examination. Often performing in masks, veils, or costumes, Jonas uses disguise and masquerade to study the personal and cultural semiotics of female gesture and symbols. The layering of mirrors and mirrored images is one of her most powerful metaphorical devices. Among Jonas' signature formal strategies are the manipulation of theatrical and video space, the use of drawing to add a rich density of texture and content, and objects that convey meaning as cultural icons, archetypes and symbols. (EAI)


Gary Hill (1951)

Gary Hill is one of the most important contemporary artists investigating the relationships between words and electronic images. His inquiries into linguistics and consciousness offer resonant philosophical and poetic insights, as he explores the formal conjunctions of electronic visual and audio elements with the body and the self. With experimental rigor, conceptual precision and imaginative leaps of discovery, Hill's work in video is about, and is, a new form of writing. (EAI)


Julião Sarmento (1948)

Julião Sarmento lives and works in Estoril, Portugal. From 1967-1970 he studied painting and architecture at the Escola Superior de Belas Artes, Lisbon, where he also received his Master's degree in 1976. He began exhibiting film, video, sound, painting, sculpture, installation and multimedia in the seventies, but also developed several significant site-specific projects. Sarmento has exhibited extensively worldwide since 1979. He has been included in two Documentas and has represented Portugal in two Venice Biennales. His work is represented in public and private collections worldwide such as: the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Musée National d'Art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Holland; the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; and the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, Mexico. In 2012, Sarmento was the subject of an extensive retrospective exhibition, titled White Nights, at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal.


Carolee Schneemann (1939)

Carolee Schneemann's pioneering work ranges across disciplines, encompassing painting, performance, film and video. Her early and prescient investigations into themes of gender and sexuality, identity and subjectivity, as well as the cultural biases of art history, laid the groundwork for much work of the 1980s and '90s. Her bold challenges to taboo and tradition can be seen as inspiring and influencing artists as varied as Paul McCarthy, Valie Export, the Guerrilla Girls, Tracy Emin and Karen Finley.
While she is often described as a performance artist, Schneemann first studied painting, and that training informed the course of all her subsequent work. It can be seen in her continuing identification as a painter and a formalist, in her attention to art-historical figures such as Cézanne, and in the hand-coloring and mark-making to which she subjected the surface of some of her films. However, the effect of her early experience with painting was also reactive and negative; she recognized, as a woman in the early 1960s working in a male-dominated medium, that "the brush belonged to abstract expressionist male endeavor. The brush was phallic." This realization coincided with an explosion of new artistic forms, and while Schneemann would never give up painting, she turned her attention to the downtown New York avant-garde's locus of film, dance, theater, and performance. (EAI)


Jemima Stehli (1961)

Jemima Stehli´s photographic works are performative experiments where she places herself as either subject or object of the image and often as both. In so doing she explores the relationship between sculpture, photography and performance and underlies the tensions that exist between these mediums. A number of Stehli´s works incorporate iconic imagery from other artists, ranging from Helmut Newton to Allen Jones to Larry Bell, investigating the traditions of Art History and exploring a contemporary relationship to them. Much of Stehli´s work is shot in her studio, placing the body of the artist in relation to the other means of production. The use of the mirror is central to many of these works, recording the image of the artist against her own reflection. The interest in reflection and the doubled image has developed into works where other people are invited to play a part in the work (Strip 1999-2000) sometimes even as collaborators as in the series made with the conceptual photographer Jonh Hilliard between 2001 and 2004.


Marina Abramović (1946)

Marina Abramović lives and works in New York. Since the beginning of her career in the early 1970s when she attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Abramović has pioneered the use of performance as a visual art form. The body has been both her subject and medium. Exploring the physical and mental limits of her being, she has withstood pain, exhaustion and danger in the quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. As a vital member of the generation of pioneering performance artists that includes Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci and Chris Burden, Abramović created some of the most historic early performance pieces and continues to make important durational works. Abramović has presented her work with performances, sound, photography, video and sculpture in solo exhibitions at major institutions in the U.S. and Europe. Her work has also been included in many large-scale international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (1976 and 1997) and Documenta VI, VII and IX, Kassel, Germany (1977, 1982 and 1992).  Abramović has taught and lectured extensively in Europe and America. She was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale for her extraordinary video installation/performance piece Balkan Baroque and, in 2003, received the New Media Bessie award for The House with the Ocean View‚ a 12-day performance at Sean Kelly Gallery. In 2005, Abramović presented Balkan Erotic Epic at the Pirelli Foundation in Milan, Italy and at Sean Kelly in New York. That same year, she held a series of performances entitled Seven Easy Pieces at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. She was honored for Seven Easy Pieces by the Guggenheim at their International Gala in 2006 and by the AICA-USA, which awarded her the Best Exhibition of Time Based Art designation in 2007. 
Abramović is currently developing the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI) in Hudson, New York, an interdisciplinary performance and education center dedicated to the presentation and preservation of long durational work and the fostering of collaborations between art, science, technology and spirituality.
Inventory-Diary # 1 To fall to one's knees, 2009, starts of with a fascination I've always had of going down a pole in of the fire department. This piece is part of a set-Inventory of daily-works that refer to issues that particularly interest me and that are somehow materialized in small ad hoc interventions. It interested me on the other hand, to explore the culture where classic Greeks not only put the Phallus in the center of the world (Delphi), but also thought the world of men and women (cf. Comedy) revolved around the divine symbol of virility and fertility (Phales). (APQ)


João Onofre (1976)

João Onofre was born in Lisbon in 1976, where he lives and works. He studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon and concluded his MA in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths College in London. He has exhibited widely his work individually in several museums and galleries internationally, namely: João Onofre, I-20, New York (2001); João Onofre, P.S.1. / MoMA Contemporary Art Center, New York (2002); Nothing Will Go Wrong, MNAC, Lisbon, and CGAC, Santiago de Compostela (2003); João Onofre, Kunsthalle Wien. Project Space Karlsplatz. Wien (2003); João Onofre, Magazin 4, Bregenz (2004); João Onofre, Toni Tàpies, Barcelona (2005); Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisbon (2007); João Onofre, Galleria Franco Noero, Turin (2007); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2011). Onofre took part in numerous international group exhibitions, amongst them, most notably: Plateau of Humankind - The 49th Venice Biennale, Human Interest at Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Performing Bodies, Tate Modern, London;Youth of Today, Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt; Video, An Art, A History 1965-2005 New Media collection, Centre Pompidou, Sydney- Contemporary Art Museum, Barcelona- Fundació La Caixa, Taipei Fine Art Museum. His work is represented in public and private collections worldwide such as: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou – MNAM/CCI, Paris; The Weltkunst Foundation, Zurich; La Caixa, Barcelona; MACS – Museu de Serralves, Porto; CAM – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon; MNAC – Museu do Chiado, Lisbon; GAM – Galeria D’Arte moderna e contenporanea, Turin; Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Ministère de Culture, Paris.


Bruce Nauman (1941)

Bruce Nauman is one of most important and influential figures in contemporary art. His seminal films and videotapes from the 1960s and '70s are among the most innovative contributions to media art. In these conceptual works, Nauman uses his body as an art object, executing repetitive performance actions in his studio. Exploiting the phenomenology of the medium, including its immediacy, space, and intimacy, his real-time gestures investigate the very process of making art.
His work is recognized as among the most influential and innovative in contemporary art. (EAI)

Ana Pérez-Quiroga (1960)

Born in Coimbra, Portugal. Lives and works between Lisbon and Shanghai. She graduated in Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon and carried out other courses: Advanced Course in Visual Arts Ar.Co, Lisbon, and the Master’s Degree in Visual Arts and Intermedia at the University of Évora. Currently attends the 3rd year of the PhD in Arts at the University of Coimbra, a scholarship from the Foundation for Science and Technology. Works primarily with photography and installation and the themes of her work range from institutional critique to a more personal and intimate universe of references. She has exhibited regularly since 1999 in significant individual and collective exhibitions with special emphasis, respectively, to : Comer o no Comer (Eating or not Eating), (Salamanca Art Centre, Spain, 2002), Made in Shanghai (MoCA - Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, 2008), Portuguese Art of the Twentieth Century: 1960 - 2010 (MNAC - Museu do Chiado, Lisbon, 2012) and the Assault of the Castle in 3 acts (Palace of the Dukes of Guimarães, Guimarães, 2012). www.anaperezquiroga.com


Nuno Sousa Vieira (1971)

Bachelor in Fine Arts from ESTGAD, Caldas da Rainha. Master’s Degree in Painting from FBAUL. Currently undergoing PHD studies at FBAUL. Lives and works between Leiria and Lisbon. Having started its exhibition activity in the first half of this decade, the following solo exhibitions can be underlined: Vison Oublier L´Attente, Galerie Emmanuel Hervé, Paris, 2013, Sala de Exposição, Graça Brandão Gallery and Casa Museu Anastácio Gonçalves, Lisbon 2013, Two together, Pinta London 2012, Um Ateliê, uma Fábrica e uma Sala de Exposição nem sempre por esta ordem, Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra, 2013, Wall Stop For This, Appleton Square, Lisbon, Somos nós que mudamos quando tomamos efectivamente conhecimento do outro, City Museum, Lisbon 2011, Haben Gegenstände ein Gedächtnis?. Hans Mayer Gallery, Dusseldorf, 2010, Chão Morto, Carpe Diem, Lisbon 2009; to Draw an Escape Plan, Graça Brandão Gallery, Lisbon, 2009; Redesenhar, Empty Cube, Lisbon, 2008; SP(H)É(I), Graça Brandão Gallery, Oporto, 2006; 1 Hour Later and Impossible Rectilinear Space (m/m# 1/6), CAV, Coimbra (2005). Alongside his artistic career, Sousa Vieira has also been developing teaching activity in the IPT Tomar, and FBAUL, Lisbon.


João Tabarra (1966)

Lives and works in Lisbon. Photography Course in Ar.Co. (Lisbon). Tabarra as been exhibiting regularly since the early 1990s. He was the Portuguese representative at the 25th edition of the São Paulo Biennial in 2002. From the various exhibitions that have been done in the gallery and the institutional context it can be highlighted the Circle of Fine Arts of Coimbra (CAPC), Cristina Guerra - Contemporary Art, MNAC - Museu do Chiado (Lisbon), Serralves Museum (Oporto), ZDB (Lisbon), Galeria Graça Brandão (Lisbon), Centre d'Art Santa Monica (Barcelona), Circullo de Bellas Artes (Madrid), among others. His work is represented in various collections as CAPC, FRAC - Rhône Alpes, Institut d'Art Contemporain, Serralves Museum, MNAC - Museu do Chiado, among others. In 2014 the Modern Art Centre of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (CAMJAP) shows an anthology of the artist’s work entitled Interior Narrative.


Bruno Pacheco (1974)

Lives and works in Lisbon and London. Degree in Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon, Bachelor (1996-1999) and Master of Fine Arts (2003-2005) at Goldsmith College (London). He was the winner of the 8th Edition of the Latin Union Prize (2004). Of several individual exhibitions in galleries and institutions stand out Slow Motion Project, ESTGAD, Caldas da Rainha, Modern Art Centre of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; Culturgest, Lisbon and Porto; Hollybush Gardens, London; Chiado 8, Lisbon and House of Stories, Paula Rego Museum, Cascais. Participated in Sigma - European Biennale di Arti Visive, Center of Modern and Contemporary Art della Spezia, La Spezia (2004) and the Beijing Biennale, National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2008). Bruno Pacheco is represented with works in the collections of CGD, CAM-FCG, António Cachola, PLMJ, among others.


Mónica de Miranda

Lives between Lisbon and London. She is an artist, educator, researcher and producer. Miranda has a Masters in Art Education by the Institute of Education, London and a postgraduate degree in Art Therapy from the Central School of Speech and Drama. She is currently developing her PhD at the University of Middlesex, London, with support from the Foundation for Science and Technology. She is one of the founders of the artistic project of residences Triangle Network in Portugal. Miranda has been exhibiting regularly and internationally since 2004. From her exhibitions we stand out: Once upon a Time (Carpe Diem – Arte Pesquisa, Lisbon, 2013), An Ocean Between Us (Plataforma Revólver, 2012, Lisbon), Secret Archives (AFL, Lisbon, 2013), L'art de export (Musée Calais, Calais, 2011), Underconstruction (museu da Cidade, Lisbon, 2011), This Location (Mojo Gallery, Dubai, 2010), Verbal Eyes (Tate, Triennial Great Britain, London, 2009), London Caravan (Iniva, London, 2008, United Nations ( Singapore Fringe Festival, Singapore, 2007) , Sintonia (Arquivo, Rio de Janeiro, 2007).


Merce Cunningham (1919-2009)

A seminal figure of the twentieth-century avant-garde, American choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919-2009) engaged the boundaries of dance for more than seventy years. Emerging from and expanding upon traditions of theater, classical ballet and modern dance, Cunningham radically rearticulated the semiotics of the dancing body and created a distinctive language that survives him. Throughout his long career, Cunningham collaborated with a number of filmmakers and video artists, including Charles Atlas, on a series of pioneering dance pieces created specifically for the camera.


Johanna Billing (1973)

Johanna Billing was born in 1973 in Jönkoping, Sweden. She attended Konstfack, International College of Arts, Crafts and Design, in Stockholm where she has lived and worked with video, film and performance since graduating in 1999. Recent major solo exhibitions include ”I’m Gonna Live Anyhow until I Die”, The Mac, Belfast (2012), "I'm Lost without your Rhythm", Modern Art Oxford, ”Moving In, Five films”, Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, (2010), ”Tiny Movements, ACCA, Melbourne, ”I’m lost without your rhythm, Camden Art Centre (2009), ”Taking Turns”, Kemper Museum, Kansas City; ”This is How We Walk On The Moon”, Malmö Konsthall, Malmö (2008); ”Forever Changes”, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel and ”Keep on Doing”, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee (2007). She has participated in survey shows such as 4th Auckland Triennial,”Last ride in a hot balloon”, Auckland (2010), Documenta 12, Kassel (2007); Singapore Biennale (2006), 9th Istanbul Biennial; 1st Moscow Biennale (2005) and 50th Venice Biennale (2003). Johanna parallel also runs the record label Make it Happen with her brother Anders publishing music and arranging live performances.


Vera Mantero (1966)

Vera Mantero studied classical dance with Anna Mascolo and joined the Ballet Gulbenkian between 1984 and 1989. She began her career as a choreographer in 1987 and since 1991 has exhibited her work throughout Europe, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, South Korea, USA and Singapore. Of her work we can stand out the solos “Talvez ela pudesse dançar primeiro e pensar depois” (1991), "Olympia" (1993) and “Uma misteriosa Coisa, disse o e.e.cummings*” (1996), as well as the group pieces "Sob" (1993), “Poesia e Selvajaria" (1998), “Até que Deus é destruído pelo extremo exercício da beleza” (2006) and “Vamos sentir falta de tudo aquilo de que não precisamos” (2009). Mantero regularly participates in international projects of improvisation aside improvisers and choreographers such as Meg Stuart, Steve Paxton and Mark Tompkins. She represented Portugal at the 26th São Paulo Biennial, in 2004, with the work “Comer o Coração”/"Eating the Heart", created in partnership with the Portuguese sculptor Rui Chafes. In 2002 she was awarded the Prix Almada (EPI / Portuguese Ministry of Culture ) and in 2009 the Gulbenkian Prize for her artistic career as a performer and a choreographer.


Ana Rito (1978)

Develops her activity between artistic practice, research and curating, conceiving projects with transdisciplinary character. A sequence of numerous individual presentations and conferences include: "Melancholia", CAPC - Circle of Plastic Arts of Coimbra (2006), "Faccia Lei", Spazio Thetis, Arsenale, 52nd Venice Biennale (2007), "PUPPE PROJECT" , Gallery MAM - Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art, Vienna (2010), within the Festival Art & Film, the project "There is no World When there is no mirror" in Pombal Palace, housed at the Festival Temps d'Images (2010) and produced by the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, “A Culpa não é minha” – A Coleção António Cachola, MCB (2010) e “O museu em ruínas”, MACE, (2011).  She is currently developing PHD studies on the relation between performing arts and the projected image (with a FCT Scholarship).

Vasco Araújo (1975)

Lives and works in Lisbon. Degree in Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon (1994-99). Advanced Course in Visual Arts at Maumaus, School of Visual Arts and Photography (1999-2000). Winner of the EDP New Artists Award (2003). Residencies at the University of Arts (2007), in Philadelphia , the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (2007), in Gateshead, Récollets (2005) in Paris and at the Core Program (2003-04), in Houston. He participated in the 13th Sydney Biennale (2002), the 51st Venice Biennale (2005), the 1st Moscow Biennial (2005) and 28th São Paulo Biennial (2008). His work has been shown at institutions such as CAM-FCG, Lisbon, MARCO, Vigo, Jeu de Paume, Paris, Serralves Museum, Oporto, SMAK, Gent, among others. His also represented in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Musée d' Art Moderne, CAM-FCG, Fundación Centro Ordóñez-Falcón of Photography-COFF, Museo Reina Sofia, Serralves Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, among others.