Artist: Bruno Zhu
Exhibition title: Continente
Venue: Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon, Portugal
Date: February 28 – May 5, 2018
Photography: Bruno Lopes / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Kunsthalle Lissabon
Leave the gallery and you will arrive at a rhetorical junction, or is Rua Nelson de Barros intersecting Rua Madre Deus? Head down the street, walk past the museum, turn right, cross the high speed lanes and take the 728 bus towards Avenida dos Descobrimentos. You’ll be driven along the river Tejo, going upstream, gazing at a body of water I once thought to be the Atlantic Ocean. Alas, no New York, no Los Angeles, no Rio de Janeiro, only more of the same continent. You will enter it slightly sideways, grabbing my legs and spreading them apart. My lower back presses past the carpet fluff, reaching the wooden floor, so my head turns to the sofa, to the pillows. Time slows down once it is upholstered accordingly. The initial pinch becomes sharp, then numb. Neither west nor east remains, only southwest going northeast and back again. I’m reading the potential between the main axes, the movements broken and restarted, much like the bus driver arriving at each stop, sometimes opening the doors to empty curbs. Whoever is there will board the journey upriver, into the continent. And our bodies pivot to northwest going southeast and back again, and so should the bus, leaving the riverside avenue, going inwards. As you come closer to the destination, you’ll meet the Oriente disguised as a steely behemoth train station. Many come and go inside it, they sleep inside it, they eat inside it, but no need to go there. Head to the building across the Oriente, a shopping center named after the first European man to reach India by sea. Walk in, head to the basement level and it will most likely be there. You’ll encounter a wish and a promise, a domain of many fragments naked, unspoiled, an invitation to gather, to reform, to draw a territory, the totality of your being.
Kunsthalle Lissabon presents a continent, a solo exhibition by Bruno Zhu.
Bruno Zhu (Porto, 1991) Recent solo presentations include ‘Bugs’ at La Plage in Paris, ‘Crew’ at Galerie Fons Welters and ‘New Arrivals’ at Foam Museum, both in Amsterdam and ‘Vista Alegre’ at Serralves Museum in Oporto. He is associated to A MAIOR, a curatorial programme set in a home furnishing and clothing store in Abraveses, Viseu.
Kunsthalle Lissabon is generously supported by Ministério da Cultura/Dgartes, Maria and Armando Cabral Colletion and by Teixeira de Freitas, Rodrigues e Associados.
