Rui Macedo’s pictorial installation, significantly entitled (In)dispensable or Painting that Unsettles the Museum’s Collection, on display in the MNAC between 15 May and 29 September 2019 and curated by Emília Ferreira, presents a group of over two dozen paintings, intended to establish a dialogue with the exhibition Reasons and Emotions.

Reminding us that an artist is a hunter-gatherer, a collector of meanings, forms, problems and proposals, this exhibition highlights the fact that a museum is a place of constant and unsettling discovery. Not only because exhibitions are constantly changing, but because even if we spend a whole lifetime looking at an artwork, it will never cease to surprise us. In this installation, which closely analyses a selection of works from the museum’s collection, Rui Macedo challenges several artists (Miguel Ângelo Lupi, Columbano Bordallo Pinheiro, Artur Loureiro and Jorge Pinheiro), and pokes fun at the very construction of an exhibition and the building that hosts it, playing with what is displayed and what is hidden in each work, collection, exhibition and space. Rui Macedo cuts out details, selects, points and connects, and in doing so, he shows us what we have already seen in a new light.

The exhibition is documented in an publication / artist's book whose circulation is limited to 350 copies signed by the artist. Contains the curatorial text of Emília Ferreira and the essays of José Luís Porfírio and Raphael Fonseca.

A facsimile newspaper for free distribution is offered to visitors to the Museum.