[open the box] Luisa Cunha

A voice that states a text with a cadence in a space is like a drawing that is carried out behind the walls of a room and that makes one’s head and body spin and walk around the room so we can read it (and perhaps understand it) or have some feeling over it, an experience, a subtle sadness, a premonition, an almost physical strangeness, an instability, a tripping over words, an epiphany.

Luisa Cunha’s sounds, her little poems, the repetitions of words that echo, belong to the field of sculpture and to drawing at the same time. Sometimes they belong to the field of conversation, but one thing is certain: they are directed at us, they are words that are written, recorded, whispered, amplified, metamorphosed and, firstly, written as if they had been drawn, for us. That is the intimate nature of her work, which should always be ‘seenheard’ (that’s right, don’t correct me, please) by each one of us. She doesn’t seem to be at all interested in the public, nor the spectators. She is interested in each one of us, personally and non-transmittable, as if she had written on each work: “I’m saying this just for you”.

Sometimes they are description of the very process of doing what is being done, as is the case of the work, Linha #1, from 2002, the text of which is linked to the act of drawing the line of text. When we walk around the room reading the little circular text we re-travel the peripatetic path of its construction, we understand how that line is a horizon and the horizon is the frontier that marks the distance from everything I can see and it is also what marks my situation as a navigator of the place where I am.

Faced with this drawing, what matters to us is that the place where we are when we read it was the place where the artist was when she made it and our eyes repeat the volutes of the lines that make up the words and, suddenly, we realise that between us and the artist there is a space, but that it is temporal and not spatial, and that all that matters for the work is that we spectators (each one of us) are here.

Biography
Luisa Cunha was born in 1949, in Lisbon, where she lives and works. She hás worked in several different media, such as drawing, sculpture, sound, photography and video. She studied at the Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual (Lisbon), where she completed the Advanced Course in Sculpture. Of note in her career are the retrospective exhibition held at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves (Oporto, 2007), as well as her participation at the Sydney Biennial in 2004. She has participated in several group exhibitions, namely: 20000 minutos de arte, Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon, 1994), Peninsulares, Galeria Antoni Estrany (Barcelona, 1995), Greenhouse display, Estufa Fria (Lisbon, 1996), Jornadas de arte contemporânea, Moagem – Palácio do Freixo (Oporto, 1996), Mediações, Palácio Galveias (Lisbon, 1997), Initiare, Colecção do Instituto de Arte Contemporânea – aquisições 1997-1999, Centro Cultural de Belém (Lisbon, 2000); Urbanlab, Maia Biennial (Maia, 2001), Prémios EDP. ARTE, Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes (Lisbon, 2002); Prémio Tabaqueira de arte pública – 5th edition, Casa dos Bicos (Lisbon, 2003), Continuare, Maia Biennial (Maia, 2003), LisboaPhoto, Galeria Luís Serpa – Projectos (Lisbon, 2005) and Uma exposição invisível, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo (2006). She is represented in several private and institutional collections, such as those of the Ministry of Culture and the Fundação de Serralves.

Bibliography
Interior-exterior: arte portuguesa contemporânea (cat.), Lisboa, Instituto de Arte Contemporânea, Ministério da Cultura, 1997.
Luisa Cunha (cat.), Porto, Fundação de Serralves, 2007.