surely smelled great

As a way of sniffing some cultural air up in my noseholes these final days in Lisbon, we went to culturgest in Campo Pequeno today. And it surely smelled great. It's a huge museum with a major concert and exhibition program, so we went along and saw everything there was to see today. First of all there where two exhibitions: Ricardo Jacinto (earworm) and Frances Stark (the fall of Frances Stark). Afterwards we attended a perfomance by Tim Crouch (England), while awaiting we didn't really know what to expect, but that made the experience even more compelling. I posted some more info underneath.

RICARDO JACINTO - EARWORM

He is one of the Portuguese artists who have produced the most individual and stimulating works in the last ten years. This exhibition was conceived as a constellation that includes and re-articulates a very significant part of his work since the late 1990s. With a solid background in different areas (architecture, fine arts, music), he has been developing a multifaceted practice, with a strong emphasis on the artistic process, which takes the studio and exhibition space as laboratories. It frequently involves collaboration with other artists and musicians, using and combining very different modes of artistic expression, with special emphasis on sculpture, sound and performance. His works, and indeed this exhibition as a whole, offer an intense experience that engages both visual and aural perception, our cognitive perception and body posture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUilmSMYgtE

FRANCES STARK - THE FALL OF FRANCES STARK

While you could say that language is Frances Stark’s primary medium, Frances herself is Stark’s primary subject matter. Taken individually, most of her works are self-portraits of some kind; put together, they fan out into full-blown autobio-graphy, featuring not just the central protagonist also a supporting cast of favourite authors, friends and collaborators, gallerists and curators, musicians, cats and kids.The first works you see in this exhibition, which gathers together a selection of around fifty works comprising collages, drawings, paintings and videos produced between 1993 and 2007 discloses the captivating world of Frances Stark, an artist who has divided her time equally between art and writing, in other words a writer who has a regular practice as an artist. Stark takes writing, the act of reading and the voice as starting points for her visual works. In them she incorporates phrases taken from very diverse sources, often literary texts, which undergo operations of repetition, reproduction, fragmentation and juxtaposition with other visual elements.



ENGLAND (INGLATERRA)

Two guides in a gallery. Two lovers with a lifestyle to maintain. Two hearts beating eight thousand miles apart. Translation. Transaction. A transplantation. ENGLAND is the story of a search for a new heart. It’s a story about a life saved and an illness overcome at any cost. It’s a tour through spaces and across borders: from an art gallery to a jam factory, from Lisbon to Osaka, from a hospital bed to a hotel room. It’s a tour to the end of the world. Taking place in Gallery 2 within an exhibition of work by Frances Stark, the play continues Tim Crouch’s fascination with the nature of the theatrical experience; the communication of an idea from actor to audience – and back again.