[open the box] Noé Sendas

Putting one’s head on the pillow and listening to a story reminds one of childhood. With one small difference: during childhood the stories don’t come from the pillow, they go to it, either directly from the imagination, or listened to by the other ear. Neither do we see ourselves reflected in a black mirror, as is the case of this work by Noé Sendas. A story comes out of the pillow, told over the phone by Sendas himself, and the soundtrack changed over time, in three different versions. The voice that tells the story is aimed directly at the spectator, now transformed into a listener, personally implicated in the destiny of that voice that comes out of the pillow and builds a necessarily intimate relationship. A strange one.

Strangeness and intimacy are the poles on which Noé Sendas’s work moves, no matter what medium he uses, from photography and collage, to video or sculpture. In any of the processes, in whatever medium, Noé Sendas’s path through the interior of the secreted, the whispered, the hidden, the failed, the unsaid, the implied and the mysterious is a strange and disturbing constant. It is as if Beckett’s ghost might peek in at any moment.

Later on, because this work is from the beginning of his career, Noé Sendas produced a set of almost realist sculptures in which a character, whose face we cannot see, is sitting, standing, lying down or in many other situations in which its quality as an anonymous homeless person transforms it into a generic character from the playwright Sarah Kane – who indeed is directly referred to in one of his installations, in which we hear a text by Kane.

Biography
Noé Sendas (Brussels, 1972) studied at the Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual (Lisbon), the Royal College of Art (London), the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as on some artistic residences, with particular note being that in the Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin). He lives and works in Berlin. He uses differ- ent disciplines, such as video, photography, installation, sculpture and collage. He showed his work solo for the first time in 1997. His career has included several solo exhibitions in Portugal and abroad, with note for the solo exhibitions En garde!, Culturgest (Oporto, 2002-2003), Ophelia, Colégio das Artes (Coimbra, 2003), Otras alternativas: nuevas experiencias visuales en Portugal, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo (2003-2004), XX Encontros de fotografia, Centro de Artes Visuais (Coimbra, 2006) and The collector, Fundação EDP (Lisbon, 2007). He is represented in the collections of the Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (Badajoz), the Centro de Arte Moderna – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon), the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Elvas, and the Fundação EDP (Lisbon).

Bibliography
Noé Sendas 1999-2000 (cat.), Berlin, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 2000.
Projecto mnemosyne (cat.), Coimbra, Encontros de Fotografia, 2000.