Exhibition catalogue for Black Skin, White Masks: The Body in Presence, on view at Galeria Avenida da Índia from March 4 to May 14, 2023. Taking Frantz Fanon’s proposal of ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ as its point of reference, the exhibition curated by Nuno Silas and Titos Pelembe brings us this publication with essays by Sara Antónia Matos and Pedro Faro, Nuno Silas and Titos Pelembe, Noemi Alfieri, Kitty Furtado.
“The exhibition was constructed, as the curators mention, from subjective ideas and experiences, engaged with contemporary thought and decolonial discourse. A broadened horizon of life is essayed, which challenges us to rethink the past and, above all, the way in which we still move and relate in the present. “I am not a prisoner of History. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny”, Frantz Fanon reminds us. So, what gesturalities are at stake in the ways of relating to the present, particularly through art?”
— Sara Antónia Matos e Pedro Faro
“Black Skin, White Masks: The Black Body in Presence is a performative exhibition, using as reference Frantz Fanon’s proposal which was developed in the book Black Skin, White Masks. Frantz Fanon puts forward a scientific and critical analysis around the psychological submissiveness inherent to colonialism and power, and to inferiorized individuals, thus providing a profound insight into colonizer and colonized. In Black Skin, White Masks, the author proposes keywords for this process, such as: emancipation, solidarity, social justice, and the construction of new forms of intellectual development for the subjected individuals. This exhibition project incorporates multidisciplinary works of music, sound, video, installation, photography, and performance, by artists established in Portugal and internationally.”
— Nuno Silas e Titos Pelembe
“The point here — in this exhibition — is to unhide this fracture by dismantling the webs of reality in which it is concealed. In this case, the exhibition is a present Black body, a territory that is an archive, and at the same time a field of cultivation for the future. A possibility of sublimation, through the violence of that exposure, which consists of giving visibility to that which in the body is a mask, and what from the mask became a body.”
— Kitty Furtado
“This exhibition, with artistic direction by Nuno Silas, and curated by Nuno Silas and Titos Pelembe, raises urgent and uncomfortable questions for Portuguese society. Black Skin, White Masks: The Black Body in Presence, which was on display at Galeria da Avenida da Índia between March 4th and May 14th, 2023, brings to the national picture a decolonizing exercise that incites debates on intricate themes, whose various layers and intersections still pose a widespread social and cultural taboo in the country.”
— Noemi Alfieri