GRAZIA TODERI

From July 23 to October 31, Serralves Museum presents an exhibition of recent works of Grazia Toderi - a contemporary artist who has adopted one of the most singular approaches to video and photography. Cityscapes are common in her work, questioning our understanding of reality and the manner in which it is represented. This exhibition presents a broad range of the artist’s most recent works, produced since 2006, including video projections, photographs and drawings. All of Toderi’s video installations since “Rosso Babel” – in which she explores the allegory of the Tower of Babel via a fantastic and phantasmagoric virtual city – will be on display for the first time.  The exhibition will also premiere the work, “Atlante” (2010) - a dual video projection in which the artist pursues her enquiries into the relationship between heaven and earth, between celestial and terrestrial mapping, once again confronting us with gravity losses and the horizon line. This work uses images taken in Portugal - specifically recorded for this exhibition.
Grazia Toderi’s cities are based upon nocturnal aerial photographs of selected cities that the artist has digitally transformed, inscribing light maps therein that pulse intermittently.  In Toderi’s cities, the images convey a notion of joy through a specific perception of time. This sense of time no longer corresponds to our standard notion of time, although we nonetheless encounter multiple references within these images that lead us to a game of recognition, surprise, enchantment and discovery. The artist’s work transports us to a territory where strangeness transgresses the very condition of representation. This transgression of representation enables us to rediscover recognition as an alternative form of revisiting realities that we thought we knew, but which now appear in a transfigured form. We perceive identifiable elements, but don’t see them as we expect them to appear. These starry firmaments, animated by frozen movement,  combine both innocence and terror, the enchanting and terrifying dimensions of an astronaut’s solitude, conjuring up an entire imaginary universe in which the spectator is confronted with the frontality of a view of the world that invariably constitutes a different perspective of a new world.


Curator: João Fernandes
Production: Serralves Foundation

GUIDED TOURS:
16 SEP (Qui), 18h30 p.m., by João Fernandes
12 OCT (Tue), 18h30 p.m., by Marta Almeida

18 SEP (Sat), 16h00 p.m., by Sónia Borges
(exclusive for Serralves Friends)