Profanações, 2022

Curated by David Revés

Comission for Culturgest Porto

Profaning bodies, profaning Time, profaning History. Appropriating the title of the book by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, Profanações aims to critically evaluate the rationalist ideals of Progress and its machinery of kinetic mobilization under which Western societies have been driven. By affirming profanation as a speculative gesture that enables the creation of new horizons of thinking and world-making, this exhibition will bring together works of distinct natures and origins, proposing several ways of pressing History and its normalizing expectations, as well as seeking to exalt all the materialities —forgotten, present and future — that exist within it.

We will thus walk through aesthetic territories that lie between transcendent and the telluric ambiances, calling upon productions coming from religion, witchcraft, sexuality, and divination, among others, asserting themselves as ways of counteracting devices of control, rigidification, and prediction of experience. In all this, a latent idea: the one that considers Matter and Earth — and all their rhythms, passions, and tumults — as agential, radical, and absolute forces.

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