Joana Escoval

Joana Escoval’s works are passages, open-ended invisible paths. The rhythm and fluidity of the elements she uses in her work are temporarily suspended in time, and will eventually follow their natural transition and transmission into other states of matter, keeping their new-found charges and vibrations from when they were sculptures. Whichever form they’re found in (mostly metals compounded or purified, mixed as alloys or mixed with other materials), these elements are charged with energies that unite beings and objects, the material and the spiritual. Escoval blurs the borders between what we are so used to calling “nature” and “culture,” and emphasises instead how everything is entangled and connected, seeing “nature” and its cycles beyond a western point-of-view—and most of all seeing it as something that is not separate from us.

A selection of exhibitions and projects include: Mutações. The Last Poet (solo show), Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon (2020); Fiorucci Art Trust, London (2019); The sun lovers, Tenderpixel, London (2018); The word for world, Greynoise, Dubai (2017), Fiducia Incorreggibile, Galeria Vera Cortês, Lisbon (2017), Transmissions from the Etherspace, La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2017), Current Detours, HalfHouse, Barcelona (2017), I will go where I don't belong / Volcano Extravaganza, Forucci Art Trust, Stromboli (2016); I forgot to go to school yesterday, Kunsthalle Lissabon and Kunsthalle Tropical, Iceland (2016); Lichens Never Lie, La Criée Centre for Contemporary Art, Rennes (2016); Matter Fictions, Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon (2016); The lynx knows no boundaries, Fondation d' ́entreprise Ricard, Paris (2015); Europe, Europe, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2014).

She won the BES Revelação Prize in 2012 (Serralves Museum) and was nominated for the EDP Foundation New Artists Prize in 2015, in Portugal. Among other residencies attention is drawn to Fiorucci Art Trust Residency in Stromboli in 2015, and RU, in New York in 2013/14.

Submitted by Galeria Vera Cortês