Imaginary Beings – Tent
Imaginary Beings – Tent Inkjet print, metal poles from a camping tent.Dimensions variable. 2022 Adopting part of the title from Jorge Luis Borges’ The book of imaginary beings, Seres imaginários, by Carla Cabanas (1979, Lisbon), is an exhibition-installation that opens the doors, on the one hand, to the private world of the artist’s memories and, on the other hand, to a speculative space of what (the constructions of) those memories might be. Continuing her investigations on the places of memory(s) and of photographic images, particularly family albums that she finds or acquires, in the construction of identity narratives, in Seres imaginários, Carla Cabanas uses exclusively and, for the first time, photographs of herself and of her family in which she intervenes to create new characters and new meanings. By offering us images from a family album in which, by its common humanity could be ours, this exhibition-installation moves from the realm of individual and untransmissible memories to the place of collective and shared memories. In both cases, it seems to be an almost impossible task to distinguish what is real from what is fictional. Luísa Santos CREDITS: Exhibition views of Seres Imaginários at Galeria Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisboa, Portugal, 2022.Documentation © Bruno Lopes Exhibition views of De onde venho / Para onde volto at Espaço Adães Bermudes, Alvito, Portugal, 2023.Documentation © Bruno Lopes Exhibition views of Serpente Infinita at Photography Biennial of Vila Franca de Xira, curated by Ana Rito, Galeria Paulo Nunes – Arte Contemporânea, Vila Franca de Xira, 2025.Documentation © Hugo Santos Silva With the support from Garantir Cultura Program by the Portuguese Republic.
The Mechanics of Absence II
The Mechanics of Absence II Installation with synchronised 35mm slide projection, 7 projections, Copper e Tulle. Dimensions variable. 2017 Following another exhibition, held between October and November 2016, Carla Cabanas will present a selection of works that address the idea of presence and absence through a scrutinizing look and a memory that becomes diffused. By constructing an experience that operates on the image and on the time that belongs to it, the artist investigates the notion of reminiscence and how it is perceived. Through loss and saturation, working with light, shadow and projection, Carla Cabanas creates a device that calls up familiar figurations, where our shadow crosses the image, in a delicate balance between what is absent and what remains or between that which fades, fixes and reflects. Sérgio Fazenda Rodrigues https://vimeo.com/257806277 CREDITS: Exhibition views of Mecânica da Ausência II at Galeria Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisbon, Portugal, 2017.Documentation © João Ferro Martins, Carla Cabanas.Vídeo © António MV
Celtis Australis L.
Previous Next Celtis Australis L. Intervention on inkjet print. Variable measures. 2015 This project contains two moments: an exterior and an interior. Both are born from the idea, developed by the artist in residency, whose starting point are the leaves of the trees in the garden. In this process the artist acquired random photographs at the Feira da Ladra in Lisbon. These were then scanned and printed by ink jet process and then the paper was laser cutted. The final work is an installation that works as a metaphor and it occupies one of the rooms in the palace and the fountain in the garden. For the artist, the main focus of the work is the point in which the installation on the garden is exposed to climate elements, such as wind and sun, and its consequent transformation. The 13.200 leaves are a metaphor for the process of life and its evolution. The visitor will be confronted, in the words of the artist, by the poetics of time. Lourenço Egreja CREDITS: Exhibition views of Mecânica da Ausência at Carpe Diem Arte e Pesquisa, Lisboa, Portugal, 2015.Documentation © Oxana Ianin
The Mechanics of Absence I
Previous Next The Mechanics of Absence I Installation with synchronised 35mm slide projection, 5 projections, dimensions variable. 2016 (…) Carla Cabanas’ work focuses on reinterpreting time and memory, through an idea of loss and saturation.Changing a set of slides, the artist modifies the story that each image retains, transforming, with that action, what was the registration of the suspended instant, or the crystallization of a special moment, in a living, undefined and fabled time.Cutting the support and marking an absence, or adding to it other cuts in order to densify the image, Carla Cabanas composes a palimpsest of references that makes room for another look. A look made of layers, where something empties and fills itself, or something forgets and remembers, with the imprecision of what memory erases and keeps.This is thus about the construction of a vision that translates a complex, stratified and non-linear time. A vision that responds more to emotion than to the rationality of chronological succession, and varies between what each image fixes and what the artist manipulates. (…) Sérgio Fazenda Rodrigues CREDITS: Exhibition views of Mecânica da Ausência I at Cooperativa de comunicação e Cultura, Torres Vedras, Portugal, 2016.
Quercus Faginea Lam.
Previous Next Quercus Faginea Lam. Intervention on inkjet print. Variable measures. 2019 CREDITS: Exhibition views of Quercus Faginea Lam. at Palácio Landal, Santarém, Portugal, 2019.