Pinnacle Grouse
Pinnacle Grouse (from the series Imaginary Beings – The Bestiary) Intervention on inkjet print and gold leaf (imitation), rotating motor, magnets.93x45x40 cm. 2023 CREDITS: Exhibition views of Pinnacle Grouse at Espaço Adães Bermudes, Alvito, Portugal, 2023.Documentation © Bruno Lopes
A Bao A Qu
A Bao A Qu (from the series Imaginary Beings – The Bestiary) Intervention on inkjet print and gold leaf (imitation), magnets.variable dimensions. 2023 The title of the exhibition is inspired by the literary work The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luís Borges. In it, the author lists and describes several fantastic creatures created over time through legends, myths, and religions. A Bao a Qu, who Carla Cabanas materializes, is a character of the book, an imaginary being, emotionally sensitive, who only reaches its full form when one travels a path of individual growth, traversing diverse stages to reach spiritual maturity. The sculpture A Bao A Qu is composed by photographs of the artist as a child, which act as a metaphor for her growth and are employed as material, rendering them visibility, and transferring them to a public setting. Installed in the laboratory’s centre, it is an allegory of the artist’s journey of personal growth as she aspires to reach the top of the tower and “to look out over the loveliest landscape in the world”. For this process to become conscious, the artist relives its stages, whose steps are winding and filled with scales. Sofia Marçal CREDITS: Exhibition views of A Bao A Qu at National Museum of Natural History and Science – Laboratory of Analytical Chemistry, Portugal, 2022.Documentation © Bruno Lopes
Family Album
Previous image Next image Family Album All photographs from a family album scraped with a scalpel, Epoxy Resin on Alucobond. 150x268x5,5 cm. 2022 The fascination of a starry sky induces the nostalgic impression of a fleeting occurrence, of the impossibility of permanence in the world. Striving to save itself from evanescence, this awareness of the erosion from passing time, from the instant of existence, ignites the drive to remember and to be remembered. Striking, and destroying, the photograph of a time gone and intimate, in Álbum de família, Carla Cabanas moves in a field that involves the fixed and the volatile.With the dust remaining from what is born and dies, Carla Cabanas merges reminiscences of the happening of life and of the stars in minuscule cut-outs that she inscribes in a new sky. Creating another story, the visual poetry of Carla Cabanas makes the indistinct clear, the distant near, and shows, after all, that the trivial is precious, and that the mundane is transcendent. Ricardo Escarduça CREDITS: Exhibition views of Álbum de Família at Appleton [Box], Lisbon, Portugal, 2022.Documentation © Bruno Lopes With the support from Garantir Cultura Program by the Portuguese Republic.
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 With the support from Garantir Cultura Program by the Portuguese Republic.
Imaginary Beings – Gold
Imaginary Beings – Gold Intervention and gold leaf (22K) on inkjet print.15 x 22,4 cm. 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
Imaginary Beings – Grid
Previous Next Imaginary Beings – Grid Inkjet print and metallic grid. 102 x 142 x 9 cm, 70 x 74 x 7 cm, 66 x 69 x 7 cm. 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
I Don’t Trust Myself When I’m Sleeping II
Previous Next I Don’t Trust Myself When I’m Sleeping II Intervention and gold leaf (22K) on color photographs; variable dimensions. 2018 – 2020 The project “I don’t trust myself when I’m sleeping”, currently with two parts, gives continuity to the artist’s enquiries about the places of memory and photography in the construction of identity narratives.The project appears initially as a response to a concrete problem. In 2018, the artist was in residence in Berlin and suffered from a crisis of insomnia, which resulted in tiredness, lack of concentration, and galloping anxiety. Regardless of its causes and whether it is a private matter, insomnia as a problem has a political dimension.Sleep not only enables the body to recover from the wear and tear suffered during waking, but it also contributes powerfully to the formation and consolidation of memory. It also seems to be important for the mental processes underlying intuition and creativity. But, as Jonathan Crary tells us, this fundamental activity of human life, which should occupy at least a third of our time, is under direct attack by late capitalism. Although it has not yet been fully integrated by it, sleep is nevertheless very fragile, and our life is inscribed, in general, in a duration without intervals, defined by the possibility of continuous functioning. Paradoxically, the artist seems to fall into this trap. Pressed by the need to present results, the artist decides to make the moments of her insomnia productive, contrary to Crary’s idea that sleep is the last instance of resistance to the voracity of inevitable productivity. But she does it according to her rules. Thus, the insomniac artist summons to her work, albeit in a veiled way, the themes and subjects that prevent her from sleeping. Using photographs from family albums found, as is already customary in her practice, the artist finds in them the ideal support to mould the images and characters of her personal history, images that cross the barriers of sleep and wakefulness, experience and memory. In addition to the usual affection with which Carla Cabanas treats the anonymous photographs that she uses in her work, this time she also introduces irony and satire, in the way she stripes and obliterates parts of the original image, populating them with new characters and new senses. The second part of this project, “I don’t trust myself when I’m sleeping II”, was carried out in 2020. In this series, in addition to scratching the images with the scalpel, Cabanas experiments with gold leaf, inspired by the Japanese restoration technique Kintsugi, about which she acquired practical knowledge in 2017. Kintsugi is a century-old method of ceramic repair, which consists of gluing the broken piece with Urushi natural lacquer and covering the cracks resulting from the gluing with gold. The aim, in making these cracks evident, is to give value to faults and physical changes in objects, caused by time or accidents. In a society obsessed with hiding its weaknesses and fixing a perfect image of itself, even if erroneous, the artist directs her focus to the opposite, summoning the difficult moments of her life as inspiration. As if, by applying gold to her torn drawings, she is softening her ghosts, accepting and even valuing their vulnerabilities and wounds. CREDITS: Exhibition views at Balcony Contemporary Art Gallery 2020, Lisbon.Documentation © Bruno lopes
I Don’t Trust Myself When I’m Sleeping
Previous Next I Don’t Trust Myself When I’m Sleeping Ink on glass, light installation, photographic album, color photographs; variable dimensions. 2018 – 2019 The project “I don’t trust myself when I’m sleeping”, currently with two parts, gives continuity to the artist’s enquiries about the places of memory and photography in the construction of identity narratives.The project appears initially as a response to a concrete problem. In 2018, the artist was in residence in Berlin and suffered from a crisis of insomnia, which resulted in tiredness, lack of concentration, and galloping anxiety. Regardless of its causes and whether it is a private matter, insomnia as a problem has a political dimension.Sleep not only enables the body to recover from the wear and tear suffered during waking, but it also contributes powerfully to the formation and consolidation of memory. It also seems to be important for the mental processes underlying intuition and creativity. But, as Jonathan Crary tells us, this fundamental activity of human life, which should occupy at least a third of our time, is under direct attack by late capitalism. Although it has not yet been fully integrated by it, sleep is nevertheless very fragile, and our life is inscribed, in general, in a duration without intervals, defined by the possibility of continuous functioning. Paradoxically, the artist seems to fall into this trap. Pressed by the need to present results, the artist decides to make the moments of her insomnia productive, contrary to Crary’s idea that sleep is the last instance of resistance to the voracity of inevitable productivity. But she does it according to her rules. Thus, the insomniac artist summons to her work, albeit in a veiled way, the themes and subjects that prevent her from sleeping. Using photographs from family albums found, as is already customary in her practice, the artist finds in them the ideal support to mould the images and characters of her personal history, images that cross the barriers of sleep and wakefulness, experience and memory. In addition to the usual affection with which Carla Cabanas treats the anonymous photographs that she uses in her work, this time she also introduces irony and satire, in the way she stripes and obliterates parts of the original image, populating them with new characters and new senses. The second part of this project, “I don’t trust myself when I’m sleeping II”, was carried out in 2020. In this series, in addition to scratching the images with the scalpel, Cabanas experiments with gold leaf, inspired by the Japanese restoration technique Kintsugi, about which she acquired practical knowledge in 2017. Kintsugi is a century-old method of ceramic repair, which consists of gluing the broken piece with Urushi natural lacquer and covering the cracks resulting from the gluing with gold. The aim, in making these cracks evident, is to give value to faults and physical changes in objects, caused by time or accidents. In a society obsessed with hiding its weaknesses and fixing a perfect image of itself, even if erroneous, the artist directs her focus to the opposite, summoning the difficult moments of her life as inspiration. As if, by applying gold to her torn drawings, she is softening her ghosts, accepting and even valuing their vulnerabilities and wounds. CREDITS: Exhibition views at Paris Photo 2019 with Galeria Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, France.Exhibition views of I Don’t Trust Myself When I’m Sleeping at GlogauAir – Artist in Residence Program, Berlin, Germany. © Carla Cabanas
The Red Phase
The Red Phase Lightjet print on duratrans,metal lightbox. 2003/2023. CREDITS: Exhibition views of The Red Phase at Espaço Adães Bermudes, Alvito, Portugal, 2023.Documentation © Bruno Lopes
The tatoos
The Tatoos Inkjet print, 75×110 cm. 2003/2023. CREDITS: Exhibition views of The Tatoos at Espaço Adães Bermudes, Alvito, Portugal, 2023. Documentation © Bruno Lopes