Rita Sobral Campos: O Trágico Destino Vertical

Kunsthalle Lissabon presents O Trágico Destino Vertical [The Tragic Vertical Destiny], a solo show by Rita Sobral Campos. This exhibition will be the first time the artist is showing in Lisbon since 2008. The exhibition is open to the public from December 09 2020 to February 06, 2021. Due to COVID-19 safety measures, there will not be an opening event.

A press release in bullet points, because, why not?

•  The artist loves gay porn.
• She’s fascinated by depictions of the devil and hell, especially from the Middle Ages.They were the means by which artists and writers could approach the forbidden. Describe perversions. Imagine alternative systems of power. Use the imaginary as a cover-up for truth.
• Enter Luca Signorelli's “Last Judgment” (1499–1502), in the chapel of S. Brizio in Orvieto cathedral. The fresco is an ode to homoeroticism, painted in the most sacred of spaces, using the fantastical to hide what cannot be said aloud.
• The artist wondered what it would be like to be him, what he must have thought when he was painting on those walls, what secrets he must have hidden.
• And so, drawings came to be. No deep, dark reason, just because she felt like it.
• Something strange happened in the meantime, she fell in love. That’s all that you need toknow.
• The rest of the show stemmed from those carbon paper drawings that have since become etchings. New mahogany spaces design the world her character lived in. Steel shapes build an alphabet that has yet to be interpreted. A grid protects a miracle engraved in a stone wall in a Lisbon cathedral.
• The exhibition comprises four sculptures, four etchings, and a poster.

Sobral Campos devises ways to deliver texts and literary accounts in formats alternative to that of the traditional novel. As such, her projects tend to evolve and materialize according to the demands of her texts, which could be film, works on paper, sculpture, printed matter, and the occasional performance piece.

She seeks to reveal, (playfully) mock, and disrupt that which is taken as self-evident. By deploying the tradition of absurdist writing and embracing anachronistic forms, her characters are able to subvert conventional wisdom. They interrogate social norms, group ethics, and unexamined prejudices, and in doing so they open up potential deviant plots, illogical reversals, and farcical misadventures. These stories challenge hierarchies, complicate gender, confuse borders, and confound the laws of nature.

Rita Sobral Campos (PT/US), born in Lisbon in 1982, lives and works in New York. Exhibitions include: short-shorts, with August Sander, Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna (2015); Tournament d’Objet, Charlottenborg Kunsthal, Copenhagen (2013); Sunday Sessions, MoMA- PS1, New York (2012); When your Lips are my Ears, our Bodies become Radios, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern (2010); Anabasis: On Rituals of Homecoming, Ludwik Grohman Villa, Lodz (2009); UNCLEHEAD with Alexandre Singh, EDP Foundation, Lisbon (2008), and Structural Schizophrenia ou quando a mentira se tornou verdade, Culturgest, Porto (2005). Sobral Campos is a co-founder of Sputnik & Fizzle, a publisher devoted to lectures, poetry, and other interventions in the world of ideas and praxis; recent titles include works by Fred Moten, Divya Victor, Mason Leaver-Yap, among others. She’s part of the Digital Corps committee at Out in Tech, building digital tools for LGBTQ+ activists around the world, and a researcher at a tech company.

The Kunsthalle Lissabon is kindly supported by República Portuguesa / DGArtes, Coleção Maria e Armando Cabral.

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