Lou Vives: Ritmos y Poemas

Kunsthalle Lissabon is pleased to announce the debut solo exhibition of Lou Vives, an Amsterdam-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores memory, queer poetics, and the ephemeral. Building on their performance piece Ritmos y Poemas, the show combines visual elements, language, and rhythm into a multimedia installation.

At the heart of the exhibition is Vives' performative methodology: repetition functions as the role of translation, where meaning oscillates and becomes distorted. Originally developed as a drum-poem performed live in Amsterdam’s Perdu theater in the festival “Voice as Landscape”, the piece transforms into a scenography for Kunsthalle Lissabon, where it will be activated at key moments during the exhibition (dates TBC). The personified representation of objects, tools, and found footage create maximalist constellations. Under the codes of music, the work reflects on transience and resilience as queer tools for navigating contemporary life.

The exhibition space serves as a dynamic visual and auditory archive, presenting a compelling range of works. Ritmos y Poemas (Performance) (2024) centers on a drum kit that drives live activations, blending repeated beats and spoken word to explore the interplay between rehearsal and script. This performance unfolds as a surreal mosaic of scattered aphorisms and imagery, evoking moments such as a butterfly being pinned down, the increasing popularity of the patron of lost causes, and recalling only the scent of a football player while entering the field holding his hand. These fragments culminate in a meditation on the impossibility of true improvisation. Optimism of the Will (2025) transforms the gallery walls with an intricate charcoal drawing that forms a figurative collage of personified objects, data containers, tools, and traces. The Drummer (2024) series adds to the narrative with ten lithographies and mixed media works reimagining fictional covers of the iconic Drummer magazine, a gay publication from the 1970’s, blending elements like Derek Jarman’s cottage, Hot Wheels, gaming chairs, and construction tools into a constellation of desire. A minha voz antiga (2017) provides an intimate touch through a rediscovered cassette tape, preserving Vivés’s accidental analog recording of their “past voice.” Lastly, I was at a moment when everything was new (expanded version) (2025) resonates throughout the gallery as a spectral, cinematic adaptation of the artist’s drum-poem, supported by Amarte Fonds and co-produced with CSX (Henrique Carvalho Lopes).

Lou Vives’ work is an attempt in remembering—a process they describe as "recognizing that my life was lived by many people." Through rhythm and improvisation, their practice becomes a poignant investigation of transience, fueling nostalgia, and the power of queer poetics in reclaiming the fleeting.

Born in Iberia in 1999, Lou Vives is an artist and performer who works with language, performance, and drawing. Currently based in Amsterdam, they graduated from the Moving Image department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, with their performance Best Song Ever (2022). Vives’s practice is deeply informed by themes of memory, pop culture, and collective authorship. By embracing the rehearsal as a space of transition, they transform personal experiences and fragments of contemporary culture into poetic explorations of identity and time. Since graduating, Vives has presented their work across a wide range of institutions and contexts, including Arti et Amicitiae, Perdu, and Garage Noord (Amsterdam); La Casa Encendida and Matadero (Madrid); Fundació Miró (Barcelona); ICA London; and Galeria Zé dos Bois (Lisbon). Outside of their visual art practice, they are also half of the performing and organizing duo Content y Contenido with Ingeborg Kraft Fermin and occasionally publishes in the Dutch-based art criticism platform Tangents.

Kunsthalle Lissabon is supported by República Portuguesa / DGArtes and Lisbon Municipality. 'Ritmos y Poemas' is also supported by Mondriaan Fund, Acción Cultural Española and Vasco Collection.