Mónica de Miranda
Born in Porto / Portugal, 1976.
She has an Angolan backgound.
She works in an interdisciplinary way with drawing, installation, photography, film, video and sound, in its expanded forms and in the boundaries between fiction and documentary.
2016
Mónica is one of the founders of the artistic project of residences Triangle Network in Portugal and the founder of the Project Hangar (Center of artistic research in Lisbon, 2014).
Exhibitions
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Architecture and Manufacturing
MAAT, Lisbon, Portugal, 2019
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Biennale Internationale de l’Art Contemporain de Casablanca
Casablanca, Morocco, 2016
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Telling Time (curated by Gabriela Salgado)
10th Bamako Encounters National Museum of Mali, Bamako, Mali, 2015
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An then again
Pavilhão preto, Museu da cidade, Lisbon, Portugal, 2011
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London caravan INIva
London, England, 2008
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Transfer
Academie des Beaux-Arts. Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, 2018
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12th Dak’Art
Dakar, Senegal, 2016
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Hotel Globo
Museu do Chiado Lisbon, Portugal, 2015
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Underconstruction
(commissioned by Paul Goodwin) Pav. 28, Lisbon, Portugal, 2009
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Do u hear me
O Estado do Mundo- sound installation, Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal, 2007
2017
In her recent project Panorama (2017), Mónica de Miranda returns yet again to looking at modernist architecture in Angola. With Hotel Globo (2014-2015), she had already critically examined the changing urban surface of Luanda through video, photographic and performative incursions into the interior landscapes of the 1950s Hotel Globo.
The modernist hotel is still functioning in Luanda’s downtown, where the architectural heritage has been increasingly replaced with gentrified, luxury high-rise buildings. In Miranda’s work, the Globo becomes a spatio-temporal and affective “lens” through which her own body gazes at the multiple geographies and histories of the city – colonial, post-independence, post-Cold War, post-civil war – in order to think on the complexity of its layered present and to imagine the possibility of different futures (Balona de Oliveira 2016; Balona de Oliveira 2017a).
In Archipelago (2014) and Field Work (2016), the twin sisters make their first appearance within Miranda’s oeuvre, another strategy to address the “in-betweenness” and the “doubling” of self and other, and here and there, that pertains to the hybrid subjectivity of diaspora (Bhabha 1994). Appearing as children in the afore-mentioned installations, in Panorama the twins have grown up.
2017
« (...)The fragmented and fragmentary nature of Miranda’s panoramic visions – inhabited, affective and spatio-temporally situated landscapes of architecture and nature – resist the depoliticised moment when meanings get lost and a concern for agency is done away with. Meanings are always contingent and positional, ever-changing and relational, but, as far as being and becoming are concerned, they are also arenas for struggles of recognition and resistance (Hall 1990)
2017
(...)As to history, memory, desire and the condition of (un-)belonging to manifold spaces and times, Panorama’s multiple and multiplying gazes do not redeem a sense of loss of stable points of origin or rootedness – an origin that could only mythically be seen to allow for a unified vision, knowledge and experience of the world, of the self and of communities.
(...)Grounded in Miranda’s own autobiographical experience of being from both Europe and Africa, Portugal and Angola (with the United Kingdom and Brazil also partaking of her affective geography), the longing that arises from the loss of a stable sense of belonging does not fall into the mythic traps of nostalgia. Instead, in and through her practice, the artist transmutes what is indeed a potentially nostalgic longing into a cosmopolitan, communal and future-oriented desire for being at home in the world (this cosmopolitanism having to remain deeply critical, however, as the ability to move across borders is a privilege that a majority of impoverished subjects worldwide cannot afford).
(...)The various composite and single shots of the Karl Marx (cinema), alongside the history told by its name change, its current ruined condition and its artistic reactivation, make evident the very passage of time in the fabric of space, the mythic quality of totalising visions – be it of the gaze, the subject, history, nature, society, origin or identity – and the imagination of alternative, shared and sharable futures. Panoramic futures, avowedly made up of moving fragments; worldly, (un-)belonged futures, produced by the very splitting, doubling and twinning of the home. »
Ana Balona de Oliveira, (excerts), 2019 in Atlantica