'Space for the Body' presents a group of works by Portuguese and international artists that focus on the body as a creative and perceptive agent, exploring its relationship with space, architecture, identity, and intimacy. This exhibition focuses on the work of women artists who have deepened a reflection about space and the body, challenging its limits. While some artists explore the formal, phenomenological, and conceptual outlines of this theme, others delve into its personal, social and political implications.

Positing the body as a situation, as a mediator of the world and as an aggregator of experiences and memories, opens paths of investigation into questions of identity that run across the works of different artists represented in the show. The exhibition includes works that appeal to the senses and to the viewer’s movement through space and relate to the act of inhabiting, as well as works by artists that dissolve the limits between their body and their practice — an approach that gained expression in the 1960s and 1970s. Performance and video become important artistic media in this period, due to their immediacy and straightforwardness, conforming to the experimental attitude of these artists and to their focus on the body. Space for the Body brings together works from this period to the present day, covering the representative time span of the Serralves Collection.

The exhibition, curated by Joana Valsassina, is part of the Serralves Collection Touring Exhibition Programme, which aims to make the Foundation’s collection accessible to different audiences across the country.


Production: Fundação de Serralves — Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto