Catalogue of the exhibition Air Pillars, a solo exhibition by Dalila Gonçalves, which was on view at Galeria Quadrum between 17th July and 29th August 2021. The exhibition has been curated by Luísa Santos. This edition features an introduction by Tobi Maier, texts by Luísa Santos, Emília Ferreira and Tiago de Abreu Pinto. This publication furthermore features photographic reproductions of the works exhibited and a record of their installation.
“Naturally, cultural beliefs and superstition related to whistling vary greatly as does the use of it in communication, music and hunting. In collaboration with a composer and an orchestra, the artist inaugurated the installation ensemble during an opening ceremony, which activated the resonating bodies of the clay animals by way of performance. During the duration of the exhibition period their presence remained a constant, yet their chant was muted.”
-Tobi Maier
“Dalila Gonçalves’s praxis rests on a fascination for the trivial objects which inhabit the world around us, in their various social, cultural, and geographical contexts. Rooted in her artistic research and production travels, she systematically collects objects to remove them from context, regroup them, or dismember them through a set of processes that breathe into them new life, one beyond the purpose which determined their conception, as a rule a utilitarian purpose.”
-Luísa Santos
“Understanding requires experience and so Dalila Gonçalves’s work, aside from recovering testimonials of the world, queries them. And she does so through the aforementioned repetition, as if to learn its intimate mechanics, its logic, its nature. In her search for traces, in her near-archaeological search (as if through the recovery of several sedimentary extracts) for memory and time, she seeks to dissect the material that she finds until it reveals itself to her.”
-Emília Tavares
“Then, and returning to the theme of the text, he told me that Cage had dwelled on an exercise that was conceptual and formal in nature, by dealing in the understanding of the relation between the corporeality of those figurative instruments and their potential appropriation. He first emphasized the shape of these objects and their zoomorphic corporeality and, following that, the relation to a hidden subject, or in other words the non-revealed body which breathes life into it, to then bring it to a close by referring to a seduced otherness, which Cage called “a body which reveals itself when the instrument is filled by vital air”.”
-Tiago de Abreu Pinto