Loops.Lisboa 2018
The National Museum of Contemporary Art- MNAC
November 30th – March 2nd, 2018
Winner: That Old Question About Sound and Image by João Bento.
The Guaraniy (Right and Left) by Letícia Larín.
The Blue Period by Mané.
Selection Jury:Irit Batsry, Alisson Avila, António Câmara Manuel, Emilia Tavares (president), Isabel Nogueira, Sandra Lischi.
Loops.Lisboa, presented by Festival Temps d’Images Lisbon 2018 and The National Museum of Contemporary Art- MNAC, exhibits in its 4th edition a set of three works, selected from 197 entries, that explicitly highlight the “manual”, “mechanical”, “handmade”, “simple” or even the “dirty”.
Aquela velha questão do som e da imagem, by João Bento, plays with audiovisual sync, juxtaposing layers of visual information in front of a static shot, creating a loop-window of particular beauty, directly associated with pre-cinema logic.
Período Azul, by Mané, combines paper, blue paint and some iconic artworks of the 20th and 21st centuries establishing a conceptual loop by building a cycle of interrelationship and permanence.
Finally, The Guaraniy (Right and Left), by Letícia Larín, attracts us towards a disconcerting formal semiotic loop, portraying Brazil’s catastrophic political and social momentum.
The fascinating thing about these works lies in their ability to overcome the “analogical” dimension represented by pens, papers, paints, cranks, photos… What unites them are broader and timeless concepts such as the desire for materiality, the intelligence of the context and the search for common sense. They strongly affirm the philosophical essence behind the loop: all things belong to cycles. Life is a loop. And Art has the essential gift of revealing this.
