[open the box] Helena Almeida

The sequence of images shows a detail of a face, a woman’s mouth, that says something in the muteness of the image. “Hear” is written over the mouth, but the vocative form, locked in the deaf limitation of the photograph, seems to be reinforced further by the sort of suture that the drawing made on the mouth marks out.

The set is impressive in the context of late seventies art, and is still now a crucial moment in Almeida’s career in the sense that her proposal to use image to carry out intense reflection on the issue of identity, body, place, the value of communication in art and its relationship with the most epidermic aesthetics of sensitivity here finds unique, intense and ironic expression.

In this series Ouve-me always has to do with the mouth, and often appears in other sets of images in a spectre that comes out of the artist’s mouth, or in the phantasmatic video image of the artist’s body crossing the shot of the canvas. Vê-me is a sound work; Sente-me has to do with the body’s relationship with inanimate objects. Like in many of Helena Almeida’s works, there is a fine ironic side to this set of works presented for the first time at the Erika + Otto Friedrich Gallery, Switzerland, in 1979 (and only later brought together in an exhibition and a book in 2004 at the Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon).

Throughout this project it is the artist’s own body that is presented, interacting with the surface of the canvas and with the several devices that identify it. Yet these images are also aimed at our bodies, because seeing a body makes us see our own bodies projected on it.

Biography
Helena Almeida was born in Lisbon (1934), where she lives and works. She graduated in Painting at the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes de Lisboa. She began to exhibit in the sixties, holding her first solo exhibition in 1967 at the Galeria Buchholz in Lisbon. That same year she left for Paris on a grant from the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Of note more recently are the exhibitions at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (Santiago de Compostela, 2000), the Centro Cultural de Belém (Lisbon) and the Drawing Center (New York), both in 2004, as well as participation at the Venice Biennial (2005), representing Portugal.

Bibliography
Pés no chão, cabeça no céu (cat.), Lisboa, Bial, 2004.
Tela rosa para vestir (cat.), Madrid, Fundación Telefónica, 2008.