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Júlia Ventura at Culturgest Lisbon

To perform with one’s body for the camera is now a widespread and highly popular practice, especially with the advent of social media. However, if we go back a few decades, enacting movements in front of a photo or video camera was a highly disruptive movement. From Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman to Hannah Wilke, the camera contributed to constructing personal identity, challenging gender notions and, above all, retaking power over one’s own image, especially that of the female body.

In keeping with the international art scene, Júlia Ventura (born 1952) has emerged in the Portuguese context as one of the most relevant artists to address identity issues. With an artistic career centred on the use of the body, gestures and words, photographic depiction and self-representation are her primary languages. Culturgest is now showing a set of works from 1975 to 1983, dating back to her early years of artistic output and revealing her early concerns with gender issues.

Creating characters and staging the gestures of gender lexicon is profoundly visible in the exhibition’s first room. She performs for the camera, sometimes standing in distinctly feminine gestures and using signs that confirm this – strong make-up, loose hair, sunglasses, a lit cigarette, a fashion magazine – and sometimes adopting a more androgynous dress and stance, hiding her hair and wearing a herb that, perched on her upper lip, resembles a moustache. This different set of signs and postures represents cultural signs of gender to the beholder, in other words, the gender ideology of a culture. They are photo images displayed and fed back to the viewer, like mirrors that emphasise the viewer’s similarity expectations.

The fascination with the experimental, with the successive repetition of gestures using the bare minimum of resources, is a constant throughout the exhibition’s seven rooms. The series of light drawings made with a pointer shows the artist’s keenness to harness the potential of photography, but also her interest in mapping space and the body’s limits. On the other hand, the series of works centred on the hands reflects her extraordinary resourcefulness. The video As Mãos (1981) is about ten minutes of close-ups of two hands, where the focus is on their tiny movements, reminding us of how hands speak in silence.

The installation is a unique part of Júlia Ventura’s career and this is one of her rare works using this medium. In Place of Enlightment (1982/2024), the audience is stimulated with a white light before entering a dark room. As we enter, we are overwhelmed by several voices simultaneously emanating from wall speakers. We hear the artist’s voice uttering words that touch on the existential and the melancholic: ‘A need of rupture, a need of confrontation, a need of fight, a need of being aware’, or ‘nothing to tell, nothing to feel, nothing to do, nothing to dream, nothing to look at, nothing to expect’. In this room, the view of the body vanishes and is replaced by the invisible within it: the voice. The artist is making us blind to heighten our senses, revealing a poetic awareness of the human body.

Continuing in the rhythm of words and sound, we see Why? (1981), a muted video that, in a close-up, features the artist’s mouth repeatedly mouthing the expression that gives the work its title. Repetition is constantly a search for meaning and the silent word emphasises the immediacy of this pursuit. This video dialogues with the artist’s phototexts, mostly based on Roland Barthes’ book The Pleasure of the Text. On a white background, the lettering stands out, shaping phrases such as ‘it granulates, it grates, it caresses, it crackles, it cuts’, or ‘slightly complex, tenuous, almost scatterbrained, a sudden movement of the head, like a bird who understands nothing of what we do not understand’. Without a defined context, the sentences drift in the emptiness of textual language, in the symbols and meanings they raise. The body, once again, is felt not through its corporeality, but through the spirit that composes it.

Júlia Ventura is a relentless image-maker. Self-representation, the body and language intertwine in a permanent dialogue with the invisible, uncovering cultural gender constructions that question the very materiality of the image. Her work reveals above all a territory of resistance, a tool for deconstructing and reshaping gender roles.

The exhibition, curated by Bruno Marchand, is on show at Culturgest Lisbon until September 29, 2024.

Laurinda Branquinho (Portimão, 1996) has a degree in Multimedia Art - Audiovisuals from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Universidade de Lisboa. She did an internship in the Lisbon Municipal Archive Video Library, where she collaborated with the project TRAÇA in the digitization of family videos in film format. She recently finished her postgraduate degree in Art Curatorship at NOVA/FCSH, where she was part of the collective of curators responsible for the exhibition “Na margem da paisagem vem o mundo” and began collaborating with the Umbigo magazine.

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