Inauguration and performance | Pedro Barateiro

The President of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa and the Board of Directors of the Serralves Foundation invite you to the opening of the exhibition Hands on the city. Artistic investigations in the urban environment - Pedro Barateiro, which will take place on 29 February at 6.30pm in the Atrium of the Central Building, Universidade Católica Portuguesa - Porto Regional Centre.

The opening will be followed by the performance How to Make a Mask by Pedro Barateiro, presented in the Ilídio Pinho Auditorium at 19:00.

The exhibition Mãos sobre a cidade (Hands on the city), which will be on show until 24 June, presents a series of works by Portuguese and international artists represented in the Serralves Collection that focus on contemporary urban reality, investigating the physical, economic, social and cultural processes that shape life in the city.

Developed specifically for the four campuses of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, the exhibition culminates at the Porto Regional Centre with the presentation of the installation Travelogue (2006) by Pedro Barateiro.

Barateiro finds in archive research and the creation of microfictions strategies to dismantle historical and contemporary narratives that continue to sustain Western hegemonic culture. In Travelogue, the artist presents a compilation of images taken from Estado Novo propaganda films, once shown at the beginning of cinema sessions as reports documenting the growth of cities and the creation of infrastructures in the former Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique. The projection structure designed by Barateiro reinforces the anachronism of these images, which today reveal more than the construction of a city, the building of an ideology.

Mãos sobre a cidade also includes an exhibition grouping works by various artists at the Lisbon campus, and the presentation of works by the artists E. M. Melo e Castro and Gordon Matta-Clark at the Braga and Viseu Regional Centres. 

This exhibition, curated by Joana Valsassina, is the third initiative organised as part of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa's membership of the Serralves Foundation's Founding Board and is part of the Serralves Collection's Itinerant Exhibitions Programme, which aims to make the Foundation's collection accessible to diverse audiences in all regions of the country.

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