During 2017 the Municipal Galleries launched the Open Call: Young Curators for the selection of four curatorial projects to be realized over one year at Galeria Boavista. For each curatorial project one publication was edited. SEVER by the curator Sara de Chiara was the second proposal. This exhibition featured works by Ana Lupas, Beatrice Marchi, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Eloise Hawser, Gonçalo Preto, Jason Dodge, Joanna Piotrowska, as well as Namsal Siedlecki, and was on view from July 21 through October 1, 2017.
“According to the curator, ‘SEVER’ is the encrypted message that Maria do Carmo – shortly before her death in Lisbon – wrote in a note addressed to the protagonist of Antonio Tabucchi’s story The Backwards Game (1981). That game, which consists of the reversal of words, is based on the discovery that a certain thing that is ‘one way’, can simultaneouly also be ‘another’ – a discovery, moreover, which is inherent to the experience provided by art and which rejects conventions, common attempts at legibility or even binary oppositions, especially those between fiction and reality.”
– Sara Antónia Matos
“SEVER brings together works by artists from different generations, which reflect on the idea of individual or collective identity. These identities are conceived as a visible element that is also shaped by its opposite side, its reverse, which always re-negotiates the boundary between reality and fiction, variously under pressure of dreams, desires, the will to transform, memory or aspiration.”
– Sara de Chiara
