Past Exhibitions 2023

25.03 — 28.05 2023
Compulsive Desires - The Extraction of Lithium and Rebellious Mountains
Compulsive Desires - on Lithium Extraction and Rebellious Mountains addresses the entanglement between extractivism and exhaustion, productivity and burn-out, across scales. Curated by Marina Otero Verzier, the exhibition takes as its starting point the ongoing lithium extraction plans in the North of Portugal and the struggles sustained by local communities for their lives and rights. Battles that emphasize how, in what has been described as "green colonialism", the development of the
"renewable energy futures", too often involves the dispossession of communities and degradation of ecosystems.
Whereas the mining industry — and capitalism cravings — subjugates and exploits the mountain and its inhabitants treating them as resources to be extracted, the violence is turned into
a force for survival for these communities through collective infrastructures and embodied rituals. If mining results in social, ecological, and mental breakdown, these practices, alongside artistic expressions, break social order to create counter worlds merging the individual and the collective, the ancestral realm and future generations, the human and more-than-human, and unleashing alternative understanding of energy.

19.01 – 19.02.2023
Derivas e Criaturas — New Acquisitions from the Municipal Collection of Art
More than thirty artworks occupied the two floors of the Galeria Municipal do Porto during Derivas e Criaturas, the first exhibition of the Aquisições project, which aims to dynamize the Municipal Art Collection and enhance the artistic heritage of Porto through an annual programme of artwork acquisitions.