Under the project Em Liberdade – supported by the Portuguese Contemporary Art Network and held in partnership with three entities from different parts of the country – MIRA FORUM (Porto), Air 351 (Cascais) and Lugar do Desenho (Gondomar) – the Faculty of Arts of the University of Coimbra presents the exhibition Para além do Espaço e do Tempo – No Sétimo Continente. With António Olaio and Paulo Mendes as curators and gathering together a significant body of work by around 30 Portuguese artists and performers, the exhibition takes us on a journey through the three halls of the Gallery of the Faculty of Arts to that seventh continent which is at once a resistance space and a reinvention ground. An invitation to reflect on the contemporary situation and speculate on possible futures, the curatorial and exhibition project unveils the depth and plurality of poetic proposals and creative positions in Portuguese contemporary art, associating artists who stand out for their historical importance – Álvaro Lapa, António Areal, Ana Hatherly; António Areal, Ana Hatherly; Ernesto de Sousa; Fernando Lemos; Jorge Pinheiro; Jorge Martins and Mário Cesariny – and more recent ones, such as Bárbara Fonte, Fabrizio Matos, Miguel Palma, Sara e André and Tiago Madaleno.

At once an imagined and real space, we step into the new continent conceived by the curators and built up by its diverse range of works, which create, as if in a game, different relationships, synergies and levels of meaning that we try to unfold. Notwithstanding the stylistic and generational transversality of the pieces and artists on show, they are united by a sense of togetherness, contemporaneity and urgency, brought about by the subjectivity of their dystopian visions. Starting from our own place, from the disquieting current social and political times, resorting to art as a way of overcoming it, the exhibition, through fictions sparked by complex realities and a mapping of individual mythologies[1], leads us to a timeless and borderless place beyond time and space.

The petrified hand ringing the bell is the opening chime to the exhibition, a provocation Fernão Cruz presents upon confronting us with the dismemberment of Dor fantasma (2022). Its title echoes the pain felt in a severed part of the body whose absence becomes ever present. The memory of loss knocks at our door, drawing on the idea of time, of a suspended action that eternalises itself and greets us, taking us beyond time, to the seventh continent.

The first exhibition section is dominated by floor and wall pieces, taking us into a conceptual, aesthetic and visual realm featuring various mediums – sculptures, installations, drawings and paintings – patterns, colours and materials. The mystery of the unknown guides us to the works of Mané Pacheco, prominently positioned in the area, plunging us into the artist’s fantastical imagination inhabited by hybrid creatures, headless, three-legged unreal beings that seduce us. Motionless in their elegant poses, arising from an encounter between the natural and the artificial – industrial coaxial cords, deer antlers or horned locust thorns – the creature assemblage makes us think of the Tripods, alien machines invading planet Earth, described by H.G. Wells in The War of the Worlds. The significance of the mystery that envelops the artist’s futuristic and fantastic universe is also revealed in Fabrizio Matos’ charcoal drawings and large sculptures, all of which send us back to a nostalgia for the classics revisited and recreated by the artist. It evokes the ancient memory and constructions, with ghostly images of temples and ruins dominated by shadow and twilight, as well as the presence of Coluna (2021), a work that is vertical and almost reaches the ceiling. Consisting of tyres – the same as those used to recreate temples in the drawings -, this sculpture inspires a feeling of instability, a nod to contemporary times and an unpredictable future in contrast to the nature and function of the columns as foundational structures.

The relevance attributed to materials, elements and their reinterpretation is also visible in Nikolai Nekh’s Museu da Gentrificação – Expositor #3, (2024). Mixing different elements – photography, platform and scaffolding -, the work is part of the artist’s documentation and design work on materials that are produced and distributed in the gentrification process. Somewhere between a sculpture and an exhibition piece, touching on the fluidity of art and utility, we see the small-scale scaffolding standing like a podium in space. Similar to the reworked bed frame on the wall, it reveals the functional repurposing of domestic objects collected by the artist – within the post-Duchampian appropriation in which he operates -, as well as the emphasis he attaches to manual execution.

The first room also includes Fernando Lemos’ photographic compositions, whose surrealist perspective provides a break with conventional reality, throwing us into an imagined and thought-provoking universe, serving as a reminder of the importance of fantasy and the irrational in the human experience, and the ability to invent new readings and interpretations that are necessary in today’s world.

Together with António Caramelo’s sound composition I’m afraid I can’t do that (2025), we watch the different works inhabiting the space and find ourselves confronted with sentences and questions that, like slogans, decorate the walls: The Age of Impotence; Transhumanism; Prehistoric Utopia; Ecological Utopianism; Labour as non-capital; Is There Any World to Come? It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.

From the first exhibition’s immersive and challenging atmosphere, we continue on to the second room, displaying works that play with the overlapping of historical times, geographies, territories and fictions, asserting the existence of a place of resistance, vindication and freedom. This earned freedom, as well as the ideas of travel, movement and escape in search of a destination and a future, are embodied in Tiago Madaleno’s installation Uma casa na praia (2024). Playing on words and graphic drawings with organic and geometric lines, the sculpture-drawings on the walls repeat the sentence um som que chega tarde a uma imagem (a sound that comes late to an image), a reference to the film and the moving image that echoes in the acetate roll and magnetic ink that make up the sculpture of a deckchair. We find again the notion of freedom, like an iron forest, in Nuno Nunes Ferreira’s Torre Bela (2025), an archive of agricultural tools which, having been inspired by the 1975 takeover of the Torre Bela estate, expresses a will to change and resist. Next to each other, and in an interesting dialogue between different geographies and materialities, the Cape Verdean and matriarchal tradition of ceramics is unveiled in Jacira da Conceição’s pieces Lundum and Abraço II (2023), semi-human figures born from malleable clay that embrace each other in a gesture of defiance in this new territory stretching beyond time and space.

Hugo de Almeida Pinho, in Solarpunk (the new utopians) 2021-25, offers us a view of the sun on the back wall, painted in blue tones. By pondering the idea of solar capitalism and its ties to the earth, energy and technology, he allows us to be seduced by the lighting scheme which, projected onto the wall, appears as the light emanating from the sun. We notice the iron piece on the floor where the king-star is depicted and painted, the reflection of which directs our gaze to the small satellites orbiting the wall. The sky blue canvas Untitled (world if there was no Land), 2023, by Fábio Colaço, is next to this piece, on a same-coloured wall, potentially alluding to the sea, which tells us about a suspended future in the age of capitalist realism.

I am useless to the culture but god loves me… is the inscription we read just before stepping into the final corner of the seventh continent, where the flickering light of Fábio Colaço’s neon work attracts our attention. A persistent and luminous statement with an ironic and subversive nature, Who killed the world, (2024,) in dialogue with the other works displayed, drags us to an uncertain and enduring place. The irony of Miguel Palma’s war machine, Paz Blindada (2025), whose paradoxical title makes us smile when we look at its white flag; the dark humour of Fernão Cruz’s Sobrevivência (2023); and the oddity and toughness of the feverish bust in Miguel Ângelo Marques’s Strategy of the pyretic encloser I (1994-95).

These utopias are projected and materialised in Coimbra on the seventh continent, a proposal against idleness, helplessness and ideological abstinence, through the revolutionary gestures of the artists and their works, conceiving alternative futures between reality and fiction.

The exhibition is open until April 4.

[1] MENDES, Paulo – Sétimo Continente, Relatório Crítico. Exhibition text, 2025.