Alexandre Estrela + João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva at Kunstverein München

Artists: Alexandre Estrela + João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva

Exhibition title: Lua Cão

Curated by: Natxo Checa (Galeria Zé dos Bois) in co-operation with Kunstverein München

Venue: Kunstverein München, Munich, Germany

Date: February 17 – April 15, 2017

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Kunstverein München

Kunstverein München presents from 17 February until 15 April 2018 Lua Cão with films and videos by Alexandre Estrela + João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva. The opening will be on 16 February, at 7 pm at Kunstverein München, Galeri-estraße 4, 80539 Munich.

From 17 February until 15 April 2018, Kunstverein München presents – The large-scale exhibition Lua Cão tests the intersection of experimental film and video via the extensive bodies of work of Alexandre Estrela and the duo João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva. Co-organized by Natxo Checa, the exhibition spans both floors of the Kunstverein.

Lua Cão is an immersive moving-image experiment with 21 films, videos, and images, arranged in five constellations. Every fifteen minutes the exhibition changes, following a four-hour-long technical script implemented by a projec-tionist, who turns the equipment on and off, and can give interpretative back-ground or answer questions.

Originally presented by Galeria Zé dos Bois in Azores and Lisbon, Lua Cão is the result of more than a decade and a half of conversation between Checa, Estrela, and Gusmão and Paiva. The title refers to a rare optical phenomenon where the moon’s light is refracted to appear in a halo with a pair of adjacent ‘moon dogs’. Moons, eyeballs, multiple exposures, tunnels, light rays, and atmospheric and optical illusions proliferate throughout the exhibition to em-phasize the role the mechanics of vision plays in both artistic practices, and to demonstrate their shared interest in the moving image that consistently con-nects abstractions to illusions, the everyday to the impossible.

A new bilingual publication of ‘literary miniatures’, written by the artists and cu-rators, will be available in March – the eleventh in the Kunstverein’s Companion-series, co-published with Roma Publications, Amsterdam.

Installation view: Lua Cão – Alexandre Estrela + João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva; photographed by Ivo Rick