beginning, middle, beginning, is the Cinthia Marcelle's first solo exhibition in Portugal, an exclusive commission for the Central Gallery of Serralves Museum.

Considered to be one of the most compelling voices in contemporary Braziian art, Marcelle has over the last two decades created a body of work that challenges systems of power, social norms and our processes of collective organising.

In what is an award-winning career, she notably received an Honorable Mention from the Jury of the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), for the project Chão de caça (Hunting Ground) and the video Nau/Now, co-created with Tiago Mata Machado, alongside whom she represented the Brazilian National Pavilion.

Inspired by the thinking of Nêgo Bispo — the philosopher, poet and Quilombola leader recognised for his activism and counter-colonial critique — Cinthia Marcelle questions the linear nature of time and its relation to the colonial and social structures that still weigh upon our day-to-day lives. Her installation occupies the characteristically neutral, Modernist space of the Central Gallery of Serralves Museum, to transform it into a setting where chronological time has been replaced by repetitive cycles of re-beginning, evoking temporal dimensions steeped in the ancestral, collective knowledge and indigenous cosmologies.

beginning, middle, beginning has come about after more than a year of discussions with the Museum team, and was developed in collaboration with vão, the transdisciplinary collective of architects and artists that are Anna Juni, Enk te Winkel and Gustavo Delonero.


Produced by the Serralves Foundation — Museum of Contemporary Art, the exhibition has been curated by Inês Grosso, curator-in-chief of the Museum.