ARC Projects gallery is now closed. There will be no further programme of exhibitions in the space at 90 Vitosha Boulevard, Sofia. Gallery directors Chris Byrne and Iliyana Nedkova have moved on to new projects. We are still taking sales enquiries related to certain artists formerly represented by the gallery. If you wish to get in touch, please see the contact details above.

Portuguese Waves

Joana Bastos
Mauro Cerqueira
Susana Mendes Silva

Portuguese Waves is the finale of a five-part ten month series of new commissions, exhibitions and events celebrating the contemporary art of Portugal.
Curated by Iliyana Nedkova and Filipa Oliveira
3 April – 10 August 2010
Open Monday to Saturday, 10am – 6pm or late on performance evenings. Admission always free
Threshold artspace , Perth Concert Hall, Mill Street, Perth PH1 5HZ, Scotland

Featured are thirteen works by Joana Bastos (b. Lisbon in 1979 where she lives and works), Mauro Cerqueira (b. Guimarães in 1982. Lives and works in Porto) and Susana Mendes Silva (b. Lisbon in 1972. Lives and works in London and Lisbon). This triple solo exhibition follows the artists’ research in Perth and their first solo presentations in a public institution in the United Kingdom at the artspace. All works are showing as curated loops at nine of the different ‘project rooms’ of the artspace including:

Three 22-channel video works for the Threshold Wave:

Ritual #2 (2006-10) Susana Mendes Silva
In this multi-channel video the personal-confessional statement ‘My obsession leads to compulsion’ is written over and over again until it becomes illegible and the paper is violently perforated. The repetition, both in the act of writing and in the dynamic flow along the wave of screens, transforms writing into drawing evoking the school punishment of copying the same lines ad infinitum.

Looking at the city (2010) Mauro Cerqueira
A journey of discovery where the artist’s hometown of Porto is both appreciated and critiqued. From sprawling touristic panoramas to close-up shots of the ancient city centre, this work mirrors the movement from the periphery to the centre of the wave of screens. Capturing the fading glory of Porto, the artist also comments on the negative impact of local politics and the proliferation of cultural tourism.

Entertainment (2010) Joana Bastos
Testing our understanding of ‘entertainment’, Bastos strings a chain of associations using words which relate directly to the artspace itself, to the exhibition context, to the community, the city, the county and the country. Her choice of colours refers to the motorway alert signs which, in the context of the wide open public site of the artspace, could be both amusing and exasperating.

Threshold Welcome – an area of 16 sensors and 8 speakers at the entrance of the artspace:

The Foreigners (2010) Mauro Cerqueira
This field recording was performed by Cerqueira while shooting his artist’s film O Salto – Serin and Rich (the Jump…) also included in the exhibition. Who are ‘the foreigners’ who dare to imitate the children of Porto in their river jumping?

Words in My Mind, Words in Your Mind (2009-10) Susana Mendes Silva
This audio installation has voiceover at its heart, originating from a collection of statements about common psychological disorders. Some of these utterances derive from the scientific description of symptoms, and others from the description of states of mind from diagnosed (or undiagnosed) people.

Threshold Stage Screen – a public interface for artists’ works which also appear on the dedicated artspace
YouTube Channel

To the Bone (2010) Mauro Cerqueira
A portrait of a man exploring old graves in a recently unearthed cemetery in the historic UNESCO-protected area of Porto designated to be destroyed and transformed into luxury hotels and apartments.

Polaroid (2004) Susana Mendes Silva
A self-portrait of the artist as instances of detachment, disembodiment and dematerialization. The portrait gradually and mysteriously emerges from the pure white void, simulating the process of a developing Polaroid photograph. However, we are denied eye contact with the artist and, in a way, the void remains.

Did I Hurt You? (2006) Susana Mendes Silva
Departing from the most simple unit of drawing and geometry – the point – this video work portrays the brutal act of perforation. The use of a pin that trespasses and pierces irreversibly a sheet of paper is as much a violent as a beautiful scene to watch.

Norie-Miller Studio – a black box for single-channel artists’ films and videos. Also showing at Threshold Plasma Screen facing Mill Street:

One Shift Smile (After Line Manager Instructions) (2008) Joana Bastos
An artist’s solo performance for camera in response to the body language requirements inscribed in the job descriptions of hostesses. We are confronted with a professional smile whose fakeness and theatricality can only be detected through its unnatural length. A playful, face to face game of endurance.

O Salto – Serin and Rich / The Jump – Serin and Rich (2008) Mauro Cerqueira
This work offers an experience of role-reversal while commenting on the limits of urban sub-cultures such as river jumping in exchange for donations from the tourists. Built in 1886, the bridge over the Douro River was designed by one of the co-workers of the Eiffel Tower and has since turned out to be Porto’s ex-libris.

Babysitting (2010) Joana Bastos
The artist stars as an au-pair in this documentary photograph taken by the mother of the child Bastos was looking after. The low quality of this cinematic image, captured by a disposable camera, is deliberately left untouched to reveal the instantaneous wonder and enigmatic glamour of fun fairs.

Threshold Flush – a distributed area of flat screens with one in each of the eight public toilets:

You Look Lovely Today (2009-10) Susana Mendes Silva
This ultra-minimalistic, text-based artist’s video might make us smile, feel better, and even look at the screen as a mirror, allowing us to adjust, or even remove, the mask of perfection.

Kitchen Notes (2007-2010) Joana Bastos
Using established social behaviours to examine both the absurdities as well as the boredom of some job roles – such as being a nanny – the artist reflects on daily chores and the human condition. This text-based work is also a comment on the distance between the employer and the artist who are communicating with each other via written kitchen notes.

The exhibition Portuguese Waves is accompanied by three new issues of Read More – Horsecross Arts journal of critical writing (ISSN 1755-0866 Online) to be published later in 2010. Newly commissioned essays by Jenny Brownrigg, Chris Byrne, Neil Mulholland will explore Bastos, Cerqueira and Mendes Silva’s new works in relation to their oeuvre to date.

Produced by the artists, curators and Horsecross Arts for Threshold artspace in partnership with 55degrees, Glasgow. Supported by the Calouste Gulbenkain Foundation, Instituto Camões Portugal of Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Scottish Arts Council.

Joana Bastos: No Money, No Honey

The first solo show in the UK by this critically acclaimed Portuguese artist. The third in a five-part ten month series of new commissions, exhibitions and events Portuguese Waves celebrating the vibrant Portuguese contemporary art culture.
Curated by Iliyana Nedkova and Filipa Oliveira
14 February – 13 March 2010
Open Monday to Saturday, 10am – 6pm or late on performance evenings. Admission always free
Threshold artspace , Perth Concert Hall, Mill Street, Perth PH1 5HZ, Scotland

‘Since 2007, Joana Bastos has challenged the Portuguese art scene with a series of provocative performances that explore the conventions of late-capitalist labor relations. The artist assumes the ordinary occupations of female workers—from blue-collar professionals to those in the service sector—and executes the routine duties of a given job description in situ. Merging the radical legacy of feminist art and the political practices of institutional critique, Bastos smartly blurs boundaries between the public and the private, fiction and reality, and aesthetics and ethnography.’ – Miguel Amado In Artforum: Critics´ Picks, Issue December 2009

For her solo exhibition No Money, No Honey at Perth’s Threshold artspace – her first in the UK – Bastos presents four new and recent works from the last three years in which the artist operates within performative platforms as an entertainer, cleaner, hostess and a babysitter. True to her preferred media of choice – women’s jobs – Bastos recreates these stereotypes as staged performances, as ironic ‘ready-mades’ questioning the agency and role of the artist in our globalised (art) world. The works also echo the notion of ‘carnivalesque gaiety’ with which anyone feels entitled to comment on areas outside of their expertise in the society of the spectacle as asserted by theorist Guy Debord. All new commissions and acquisitions are showing at the different ‘project rooms’ of the artspace including the Wave, Stage and Flush areas, as well as the artspace dedicated YouTube Channel.

Joana Bastos (born Lisbon, 1979 where she lives and works) graduated with a MFA Degree from Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, 2008 and a BA Hons Degree in Painting from University of Fine Arts, Lisbon, 2004. Her latest solo shows include: Ask me, Kusnthalle Lissabon, Lisbon, 2009; Black Journeys, Lagar do Azeite, Oeiras, 2006; 8&80, Instituto Camões, Luxembourg, 2006; Blindfolded, Way of Arts, Estoril, 2005; Ink, Lagar do Azeite, Oeiras, 2003. She also participated in a number of group shows including: Impossible Exchange, Frieze Projects, Frieze Art Fair, London, 2009; Entre o Céu e o Mar – Allgarve, CAV no Centro Cultural de Lagos, Lagos, 2009; Job Interviews, Battersea Art Centre, London, 2009; Propeller Island, South Kensington Artists Run Space, London, 2009; Employability, Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, 2008; 7 Artistas ao 10 Mês, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, 2008; Condensation I, Decima Gallery, London, 2008. Bastos’ practice is represented by Vera Cortês Art Agency. Her exhibition No Money, No Honey at Threshold artspace, Perth, 2010 is her first solo presentation in the UK.
www.joanabastos.com

Supported by the Calouste Gulbenkain Foundation, Instituto Camões Portugal of Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Portuguese Arts Council Acordo Tripartido Fund

Susana Mendes Silva

The first solo show in the UK by this internationally acclaimed Portuguese artist. The second in a five-part ten month series of new commissions, exhibitions and events Portuguese Waves celebrating the vibrant Portuguese contemporary art culture.
Curated by Iliyana Nedkova and Filipa Oliveira
14 January – 13 February 2010
Open Monday to Saturday, 10am – 6pm or late on performance evenings. Admission always free
Threshold artspace , Perth Concert Hall, Mill Street, Perth PH1 5HZ, Scotland

‘The restless, ingenious Susana Mendes Silva has worked across many media, settling on none. She has made disturbing fused objects (a golden tampon in the shape of a bullet, a bar of soap implanted with a razorblade); she has done a witty and anxious private performance-on-demand (“Artphone: +351 91 7218012: Don’t be afraid to ask anything you always wanted to know about contemporary art,” she said on a flyer, and I assume the offer still stands); and she has taken disembodied photographs of her feet, as if both of these body parts somehow have minds and lives of their own. These images are characteristically cute and also rather lonely: the body is a delightful and perplexing encumbrance, a whole other country that never appears whole.’ - James Westcott

A versatile artist, Susana Mendes Silva, moves with ease and expertise through different subject areas often responding to the spaces she is exhibiting in, as well as to the people associated with these places. For her solo exhibition at Threshold artspace – her first in the UK – Mendes Silva presents five works from the last six years in which language, voiceover and text is central. There are works that literally speak to us direct, and others that entangle us in the intricacies of writing both as drawing and video making. At first sight these works might transpire as formally minimalist, but after some contemplation they become profoundly disconcerting and unsettling.

All new commissions and acquisitions are showing at the different ‘project rooms’ of the artspace including the Welcome, Wave, Stage and Flush areas, as well as the artspace dedicated YouTube Channel.

Susana Mendes Silva (born Lisbon, 1972, lives and works in London and Lisbon) has created a varied body of work since the mid-1990s, making use of photography, video, installation, drawing, and performance. She has worked from a specifically female consciousness and sensibility, building a style that is fragmented and antilinear, one that exudes poetic irony and finesse, balancing itself on the fine line of indifference and invisibility, intimacy and aggression. She studied Sculpture in FBAUL (Lisbon, PT), and is currently a MPhil/PhD candidate in Fine Art (Studio Based Research) at Goldsmiths College, London. Mendes Silva is a Research Assistant at the University of Évora since 1999. Her latest solo and group shows include X at Marz Galeria, Lisbon; Beyond Time at National Museum Soares dos Reis, Porto and One Hundred Drawings at Viarco Express, Museum of the Presidency of the Republic, Lisbon. Her exhibition at Threshold artspace, Perth is her first solo presentation in the UK.
www.susanamendessilva.com

Supported by the Calouste Gulbenkain Foundation, Instituto Camões Portugal of Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Portuguese Arts Council Acordo Tripartido Fund

ARC Projects hosts a presentation of artworks by a diverse range of artists over the period of a year. The concept is to provide a venue for the display and sale of a number of works, most of which have not been seen in Sofia before. Instead of showcasing solo exhibitions by gallery artists, ARC Projects will be showing limited edition prints, original drawings and paintings, and photographs by numerous artists within and outwith the gallery roster. The display will change on a regular basis over the course of the year.

Unlike previous ARC Projects exhibitions there will be no preview, no wine reception and no guest list because the idea is to have a long running display where visitors can call for an appointment to pop in and have a look.

The first iteration of Marketplace features artworks by Bulgarian and international artists, including including Alla Georgieva, Nina Kovacheva, Pravdoliub Ivanov, Ivan Moudov, Milena Putnik, Kosta Tonev, Valentin Stefanoff, Mare Tralla, Iva Vacheva.

Further details on the artists and artworks will appear here soon: bookmark this page for updates.

1 May 2009 – 30 April 2010
Exhibition open by appointment only
ARC Projects
4th Floor, 90 Vitosha Boulevard
1463 Sofia, Bulgaria

ARC Projects Major Sponsor LIA company, Sofia.

Visit our web site for more information: www.arcprojects.org