Dissident Bodies brings together works that explore the body and its experience in an increasingly posthuman present. The exhibition moves beyond a purely anthropocentric understanding of life, focusing instead on emergent forms of subjectivity shaped by technological, ecological, political, and emotional entanglements. The body appears as an open, relational site where multiple influences converge. Themes such as hybridization, metamorphosis, fluidity, and the tension between nature and technology shape the exploration of new forms of embodiment.
Several artistic positions explore these transformations through hybrid or transitional forms. André Romão’s sculptures transport viewers to surreal, melancholic landscapes inhabited by interwoven human, animal, and vegetal presences. Evoking similarly mythic atmospheres, Hugo Canoilas’s works function as porous thresholds between subject and environment. In a related way, Lito Katou’s sculpture stages a post-human grotesque in which organic and synthetic, animate and inanimate elements converge.
Other works address embodiment through questions of identity, technology, and relationality. Across mental imagery, corporeal presence, and online personae, Esse McChesney produces textiles that center queer, non-binary, and trans perspectives grounded in critical intimacy and the exploration of identity. Laila Majid and Louis Blue Newby’s film approaches queerness as a speculative and forward-looking mode of relation, while Odete and Diana Policarpo revisit feminist science fiction through a film that intertwines bioethics, palaeontology, and speculative thought to examine how scientific imaginaries shape regimes of truth and structures of power.
The exhibition also reflects on historical processes through which bodies have been classified, displayed, or silenced. Addressing racialized histories of objectification, Kiluanji Kia Henda presents a portrait that reveals violent mechanisms through which Black bodies have been reduced to objects of display and control. Hugo de Almeida Pinho critically interrogates the boundaries between knowledge and epistemic violence. Eliška Konečná extends this inquiry through works that foreground fragility, intimacy, and corporeal trace.
Alice dos Reis’s film is set in Portugal’s Serra da Gardunha and weaves local stories of mysterious lights with personal experiences, geology, and the theme of unwanted pregnancy. Manuel Sékou’s sound-based work employs layered soundscapes and rhythmic structures, treating sound as a space of encounter that evokes hybrid connections between the organic and the synthetic.
By focusing on the potential of the body in a state of limbo and of being somehow »in-between«, the exhibition Dissident Bodies explores queerness, alienation, racialisation and hybridity not as fixed categories, but as dynamic processes.
