Artist: Diogo Evangelista
Exhibition title: Spinning Wheel
Curated by: João Laia
Venue: Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius, Lithuania
Date: September 14 – October 18, 2018
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius
Spinning Wheel is the first solo presentation of Portuguese artist Diogo Evangelista’s work in the Baltic countries. Conceived as an immersive experience, the exhibition takes its name from a 2017 performance which investigates the triangulation between bodily motion, mechanics and the visible. The different elements of the project configure a fluid organism which looks into the mutant configuration of our lived environments. The exhibition presents a number of new work, including the video Organic Machinery and displays the moving image installation The Sky Exists in an outdoor setting for the first time. Evangelista’s body of work revolves around themes of desire and transformation, exploring the animist potential that the human imagination has to appropriate concepts, images, objects, narratives and environments.
List of works:
Irrational Man (2015) examines the limits of human cognition. In a slapstick narrative that appeals to synaesthetic nostalgia, we are guided by a chromatic oscillation with a rhythmic unravelling that breaks the linearity of perception and disturbs our cerebral hemispheres. Irrational Man brings us closer to the Uncanny Valley, where human similitude with robots is brought to the fore.
Blood Chain (2018)
The series of paintings portrays an enlargement of human red blood cells. Organised in a straight line, the images build a sort of circulatory system connecting all the works in the show and emphasising its fluid environment.
Inflated with a Fluid (2018)
This sculptural set presents an assembly of humanoid busts. Halfway between metal mummies and robotic endoskeletons, the figures stand as a monument to alien life forms while singling the presence of the other in the human.
84 per cent (2015)
The video explores contemporary regimes of visibility via the use of the natural phenomena of bioluminescence and its current employments in human medicine. The sci-fi scenario and hyper sophistication of the research laboratories contrast with the humble and nostalgic tone of the last section of the work, which emphasises our human fragile constitution.
an individual note on image, sounds and technologies (2016)
The work is a mise-en-abyme which explores the unstable matrix of technology. The expanded scale of the compact disc describes a complete life cycle while illuminating its composite constitution halfway between prophecy and memory, while mirroring the meditative properties of a mandala.
Organic Machinery (2018)
This new video introduces narrative linearity for the first time in the work of Evangelista. It describes the preparations for space travel in a near future. The monologue’s low and soft tone induces a meditative feeling which blurs the boundaries between on and off screen.
– Outdoor Installation, CAC Sculpture Yard
The sky exists (2017)
The video originates in recent viral news. An outdoor billboard in China advertising summer beach destinations was falsely portrayed in the West as a staging of sunsets and sunrises. Air pollution was supposedly so extreme that it had blocked the sun, preventing the witnessing of the natural phenomena, the billboard employed as a means to counter such state of things. Evangelista´s gesture turns fiction into reality questioning the contours of our daily life.
– Performance (Opening)
In Spinning Wheel (2017) a bicycle becomes an interface between body and mind. In the performance repetitive movements of concentration and effort generate light spirals in a cyclical process of movement and stasis.
Diogo Evangelista (b. 1984) lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal. The work of Diogo Evangelista reconsiders the status of images and their potential as countercultural vehicles. His body of work designs nonlinear narratives and speculative viewpoints of reality. Recent solo and group exhibition include Inflated with a Fluid, Cripta 747, Turin (2018), Space of Flows, ZDB, Lisbon (2017), Greater Than Sum, David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2017), The Eighth Climate (What Does Art Do?), 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016), Hyperconnected, MOMMA – Moscow Museum of Modern Art for the 5th Biennale for Young Art (2016), Matter Fictions, Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon (2016), Magician’s Right Hand, Futura, Prague (2016) and Hybridize or Disappear, MNAC –National Museum of Contemporary Art, Lisbon (2015).
