AN EXHIBITION KARL RECOMMENDS: JOANA VASCONCELOS

Château de Versailles

Place d’Armes – 78000 Versailles

http://www.vasconcelos-versailles.com/en

Through September 30th

The nature of Joana Vasconcelos’ creative process is based on the appropriation, decontextualisation and subversion of pre-existent objects and everyday realities. Starting out from ingenious operations of displacement, a reminiscence of the ready-made and the grammars of Nouveau Réalisme and pop, the artist offers us a complicit vision, but one which is at the same time critical of contemporary society and the several features which serve the enunciations of collective identity, especially those that concern the status of women, class distinction or national identity. From this process there derives a speech which is attentive to contemporary idiosyncrasies, where the dichotomies of hand-crafted/industrial, private/public, tradition/modernity and popular culture/erudite culture are imbued with affinities that are apt to renovate the usual fluxes of signification which are characteristic of contemporaneity.

In 2006, she won the award The Winner Takes It All from Berardo Foundation to create the work ‘Néctar’ for the Berardo Collection Museum, Lisbon. In 2003, the artist won the Fundo Tabaqueira Arte Pública (Tabaqueira Fund for Public Art) for an intervention project at Largo da Academia das Belas Artes, in Lisbon. In 2000, she won the Prémio EDP Novos Artistas (Young Artists EDP Prize).