Currently on show at Centro de Arte de Oliva (São João da Madeira), the exhibition Ana Vieira: Cadernos de montagem offers a retrospective look at a set of works – installations, objects, drawings and annotations – by the artist created between 1977 and 2014. With curatorship by Antonia Gaeta, architect Astrid Suzano and researcher and conservator Sofia Gomes, in collaboration with the Banco de Arte Contemporânea (BAC) and the heirs of Ana Vieira’s (1940-2016) artistic and documental estate, and her children Miguel and Paula Nery, the exhibition encourages us to contemplate the protection of posthumous contemporary artistic legacies and how to develop and adopt strategies to conserve them. When the artist is not a centrepiece in preserving and extending their body of work, activating installations becomes complex and may not even be feasible on account of insufficient documentation or material shortcomings. The relevance of activating/exhibiting in preserving this sort of work and its identity is evident, as is the need to establish strategies to rethink solutions for future versions. Bearing in mind these issues and the challenges of preserving and presenting works that require assembly in the artist’s absence, the curators were inspired to devise an exhibition and editorial project, on show at Centro de Arte de Oliva, that would lead to the making of assembly notebooks – the groundwork for the reinstallation of works like Ensaios para uma paisagem and Antecâmara (2002).

From drawings and notes revealing her creative process, we are guided through the exhibition grounds by Ana Vieira’s eleven works, renowned among her peers, critics and art historians as one of the most prominent and influential artists of the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century in Portugal. Having been responsible in the 1960s for battling against the traditional art mediums by reconsidering sculpture and painting through prints, objects, installations and environments, the relationship and undefined boundaries between the interior and exterior are a recurring theme in her oeuvre, as witnessed by the works on display, before which we adopt the role of voyeurs. With conceptualism as a base, Ana Vieira explores materials, supports and images throughout her various work stages, creating plastic and visual conditions that encourage us to think about the observer’s relationship with the object and the image as a method of questioning reality. A constructor of environments, places and objects, the artist uses them to invite us to sensorially explore space.

The exhibition’s first section introduces us to the paper study and respective installation of O desenho da menina a fugir do seu suporte (2014), a multimedia work consisting of three digital video screenings, muted and looped, with hand-drawn frames by the artist, depicting the life-size figure of a girl running uninterruptedly towards an idea of escape, related to the social, political and economic discomfort experienced in Portugal at the time it was created. The piece is projected from right to left along three white walls, and its technological intricacy requires a suitable space to exhibit it -, a feat met at Centro de Arte de Oliva: it is white and has physical gaps between the projections, creating a ghostly visual effect of the girls appearing and vanishing from one wall to the next, and the satin floor reflecting the video images, a detail giving the work added aesthetic value.

In the second exhibition room, Ana Viera’s fascination with questions related to women’s role and relationship with the domestic environment, centred from the 1960s on the intimacy and memory preserved in private spaces, is presented in Santa paz doméstica, Domesticada? (1977). Ironically addressing the issues of feminism and its expectations, the installation features a domestic interior made up of an armchair which, surrounded by different objects from the feminine universe, reveals the absence of a woman. A script alongside the installation describes the woman’s erotic relationship with housekeeping, in a work that, as a whole, is a critique by the artist of her condition as a woman, the society of the time and the female state of affairs in the 70s. Sharing the same space, the problematisation of the notion of sculpture, of voids that are turned into volumes and the dualities of interior/exterior, hiding/revealing, are shown in the set of three large plaster casts – profiled moulds of classical figures in half-open wooden boxes -, reminiscent of the reproducibility of a work of art and its desacralisation.

Turning the passive and contemplative viewer into an active observer interested in interacting with the work, upon moving to the next room, we highlight the presence of Vigias I, II, III (2008) – three white boxes hanging on the wall, each with slits, inviting us to become part of the work by sticking our heads inside, from where we can observe and be observed. Following the same voyeuristic rationale, Close-Up (17) and (18) (2004), a set of two white panels with photographs attached to their faces, turned to the wall, is shown through a set of small mirrors showing us objects and spaces associated with homes and domestic life through the act of peeking.

In the same room, preceding as visual echoes the installation Le Déjeuner sur L’Herbe 77 (1977), we notice documental elements from Ana Vieira’s estate concerning the work: the Alternativa Zero catalogue, an explanatory drawing/plan by the artist from 1976, and a photocopy describing the installation. Drawing on the presence of Eduard Manet (1832-1883), Ana Vieira uses the painter’s landmark work Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) – the epitome of modern art – to cast it onto a tablecloth spread out on the floor, which is performatively interpreted as a picnic. On top of the projection of Manet’s painting – which questioned the canons accepted by the Academy in the nineteenth century – the artist sets up three-dimensional objects from our time that point to an interior setting: glasses, plates, plastic fruit, a basket with brushes and a painting palette. Just like when it was exhibited at Alternativa Zero in 1977, also at Cento de Arte de Oliva, the installation Le Déjeuner sur L’Herbe 77 – relevant as far as the traversal of times and spaces is concerned – is in an isolated, dark and closed room, where the space is felt and experienced by the audience with their bodies. A sensory and spatial experience that can be found again in Antecâmara (2002), a work with a powerful scenic aspect, consisting of a white, empty room reached through a small corridor with a flying white curtain hanging from one of the walls and lit from the outside. Besides the white curtain, the only moving element in the absence-dominated space, there is simultaneously a looming presence suggested by the sound of a woman’s footsteps. It was last exhibited in 2011 at the CAM of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and, before entering Antecâmara, we must emphasise the curatorial decision to present the artist’s drawings and notes on the work and its installation at Lisbon’s Galeria Giefarte, where it was shown for the first time in 2002.

To close the exhibition, in the last room dedicated to it, the installation Ensaio para uma paisagem, shown only once in 1997, in the Veado room of Lisbon’s Natural History and Science Museum, is presented. Along with a soundtrack, the technically complex work is formed by electronic mechanisms inside seven large parallelepipeds made out of different materials, connected by pipework and aligned in space. Creating different visual and sound effects, each structure reproduces natural sensations that result in a spatial continuum: mirrored metal, wood, wind, humidity, lighthouse, sand and smoke. Having been presented twenty years after its first and only performance, without the artist’s presence and the know-how to install it again, the revival of Ensaio para uma paisagem was only achieved through research and collective effort.

Ana Vieira: Cadernos de montagem is a key contribution to preserving the artist’s legacy and her future presentations, having the objective of studying, documenting and developing assemblage notebooks on Ana Vieira’s body of work, whose booklets, according to the curators, ‘will be useful to museums, researchers, universities, art schools, artists and anyone interested in the artist’s work, as well as helping to reflect on the issues presented by this collection and others like it’.

Ana Vieira: Cadernos de montagem is showing at Centro de Arte de Oliva until 9 March, 2025.