Joana Vasconcelos was born in Paris in 1971. Lives and works in Lisbon.
She studied at Ar.Co, in Lisbon, and has exhibited regularly since the mid-1990s. After her participation in the 51st International Art Exhibition– la Biennale di Venezia in 2005, her work became known internationally. Recent highlights of her career include Trafaria Praia, project for the Pavilion of Portugal at the 55th International Art Exhibition– la Biennale di Venezia (2013); a solo exhibition at the Château de Versailles, France (2012); participation in the group exhibition 'The World Belongs to You' at the Palazzo Grassi/François Pinault Foundation, Venice (2011); and her first retrospective, held at the Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon (2010).
The nature of Joana Vasconcelos’ creative process is based on the appropriation, decontextualisation and subversion of pre-existent objects and everyday realities. Sculptures and installations, which are revealing of an acute sense of scale and mastery of colour, as well as the recourse to performances and video or photographic records, all combine in the materialization of concepts which challenge the pre-arranged routines of the quotidian.
Starting out from ingenious operations of displacement, a reminiscence of the ready-made and the grammars of Nouveau Réalisme and pop, the artist offers us a complicit vision, but one which is at the same time critical of contemporary society and the several features which serve the enunciations of collective identity, especially those that concern the status of women, class distinction or national identity. From this process there derives a speech which is attentive to contemporary idiosyncrasies, where the dichotomies of hand-crafted/industrial, private/public, tradition/modernity and popular culture/erudite culture are imbued with affinities that are apt to renovate the usual fluxes of signification which are characteristic of contemporaneity.
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