»Walking on Glass«

Miguel Leal will go through several of his projects from the 90s, starting with the Bunker Project (Museum of Modern Strategy) to more recent projects and exhibitions, including residencies in the Tarrafal Concentration Camp in Cape Verde, or fieldwork carried out in Cuba, Mexico or in mountain areas in northern Portugal where tungsten was mined to exhaustion in the 40s. Among other folds, his work is traversed by a desire to walk, sometimes literally adrift, and by a special care for the field of image, the materiality of things and the media, as well as the layers and flows of history, politics and memory.

Miguel Leal (*1967) is a visual artist living and working between Porto and Afife. He studied Fine Arts, Painting, History of Art, Philosophy and Communication and Language in Porto and Lisbon. He is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto and integrated member of the Research Institute i2ADS.

Some of his recent exhibitions include Pedras, in 2022, at the Arouca Monastery and Trilobites Museum, Arouca (with Carla Cruz and Cláudia Lopes), Geometria Sónica, 2018, at Arquipélago – Centro de Artes Contemporâneas, Ribeira Grande, S. Miguel, Azores or Duplo Negativo/Double Negative, in 2018, at CIAJG – Centro Internacional de Artes José de Guimarães, Guimarães.

He publishes regularly, including two recent books. The first, Pedras Figuras (Edições i2ADS, Porto, 2022), is a more experimental publication resulting from several periods of residence in the mining areas of Arouca and S. Pedro do Sul, in northern Portugal. The second, Uccellacci e Uccellini: East of The City (Edições i2ADS, Porto, 2023), of which he is the editor, focuses on everything that often escapes the constraints of fixed routes or set directions in cities and beyond, allowing us to freely rethink the way communities organise themselves and move around, reinventing the territory beyond the formal instruments of urbanism, official culture or capital-intensive production.

[+ www.ml.virose.pt]

Organisation: Klasse Kretschmann

* im Rahmen der Lecture Series von Prof. Kretschmann / Prof. Linke / Prof. Pirici