MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art – Chiado and DuplaCena present, for the 11th consecutive year, an exhibition dedicated to the loop as a seminal form of the moving image, capable of transforming our experience of time and memory.

Bringing together historical and contemporary works, this new edition of LOOPS. EXPANDED opens on 14 July with Ah! Se a Vida Fosse Sempre Assim… (Ah! If Life Were Always Like This…), by Karim Aïnouz and Marcelo Gomes. In this looped long take, the artists evoke, through a gesture of profound intimacy, the feeling of an infinite longing, of a moment suspended in time.

The exhibition continues from 11 to 30 August with two formally and conceptually experimental video works selected through the annual Open Call. The first, Rosa / Zita: A Liminal Space, by Eunice Pais, employs cyclical structures to appropriate the artist’s personal narrative as a postcolonial archive shaped by inheritance, displacement, and return.

Maquinal, by Leonardo Gracés, is a moving-image diptych in which repetition and juxtaposition invite viewers to continuously reconfigure their perception and interpretation of the images.

The exhibition concludes with La Jetée by Chris Marker, a landmark work in the history of experimental cinema whose singular treatment of time, memory, and narrative has profoundly influenced generations of filmmakers, artists, and theorists. The work will be on view from 15 September to 3 October.

PROGRAMME 2026