In the shadow of Technology – Journal SUN

Electronic Baby Hammocks transformed into works of art, display boxes radiographs, music and dance from around the world compiled a frantic video, a TV screen in operation but partially painted. Technology and a critical view of today are in every corner of ‘Under the Clouds: Paranoia of the Digital Sublime’., Exhibition at the Serralves Museum in Oporto, until 20 September

The show , curated by João Ribas, deputy director of the museum, it assumes that the postwar world lives under a double shadow: a mushroom-shaped cloud of the atomic bomb and the cloud of information networks. Interestingly, the second was a corollary of the first: in case of nuclear attack, it was necessary to maintain a communications infrastructure that resisted through a network of digital connections. Thus was born what we now know as the internet.

“The exhibition is not chronological, but each room introduces several themes and strands. There is an image saturation and content of an almost rhetorical way is to strengthen the contemporary life experience. We are in a room and still hear what is going on in the former, a cacophony that also has to do with the boundary between public and private space, “explains the SOL João Ribas, 36, who came to Serralves in January 2014, after an award-winning course in the United States, particularly in the Visual Arts Center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The journey through this exhibition starts literally on the Silver Cloud Andy Warhol and several other big names represented such as Joseph Beuys, Guy Debord, Yves Klein and Christopher Wool. The oldest work dates from 1957, but there are a lot of very recent pieces by young artists like Portuguese Pedro Henriques. In fact, the presence of national artists is significant. “The Portuguese artists have much to say on these topics. My curiosity has no geographical boundaries, but part of our mission is to provide an international context to the Portuguese art and put their production in an international context “, explains Ribas.