This exhibition brings together a diverse group of works, from the collection of the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea, dating from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present day. Organized around four concepts – Place, Reversibility, Debasement and Event – the works are related in non-chronological order stressing  the difference  that each brings to the discursive net of the group to which it belongs. It is therefore possible that a distant work has a greater affinity with a contemporary one than with those that directly follow it chronologically. The choice of these four concepts departs from interpretive strategies applied to possible lines of artistic practices in the present day. By assembling  such different times temporalities under the banner of each of these concepts, we propose other modes of fictitious construction for their understanding; modes which are in no way fanciful by virtue of their opposition to the reality of a historicist reading, but rather, afford us the opportunity to consider the fictions of artistic practice as distinctly intelligible.

Pedro Lapa
Director