Fenestra Alexandre Farto aka Vhils Opening: 14 May, 2-9 pm 14 May – 12 June 2021 Galeria Vera Cortês "Since 2014, Vhils (Alexandre Farto) has been shooting, at extremely slow speeds, everyday views of cities all over the world: Beijing, Cincinnati, Hong Kong, Lisbon, Los Angeles, Macau, Mexico City, Paris, and Shanghai, being just some of the cities where he worked, and that involve us and grab our attention. In 2018, in the rooms of Cent Quatre, the cultural centre in Paris, Vhils presented a first version of this set of urban recordings. It was a sequence of flat projections, each one simulating, because of their size, the monumentality of widescreens. The scale established between the projected image and the audience created a direct confrontation between the viewer and the urban footage – the surrounding architecture, the pedestrians, and the passing cars. The spectator followed the slow-moving visual elements recorded in each “panorama” and blended in with them, altering their own momentum around the exhibition space, without realisation. Now, at Galeria Vera Cortês, fragments of those same cities are projected on the four walls of a contained indoor space. The solution here is entirely different. According to an image-carousel logic, the cities appear one after the other, interlinked in a never-ending journey. Spectators are surrounded by a chain of images, unable to free themselves, as if captured in a visual trap. The triviality of the chosen shots for each city (rarely showing easily recognizable characteristics of each one of them) makes us mix them up, and forces us into a constant game of recognition. The non-fictional recordings, documental or simple camera surveillance footage, separate this project from aesthetic, self-referential, or art history justifications. The shuffling of references, the spatial confinement, as well as the regimen that dictates the proposed visual flux, are essential elements in the definition of the viewer’s situation – one of submission and constraint. The slow rhythm of the images forces us to a time of attention/observation, that reveals itself to be a discomfort that leads us to exasperation; or we are taken in by that whirlwind, by a kind of fascination and horizontal vertigo. (...)" João Pinharanda Full press release: https://bit.ly/3uwfOxK __ Opening hours: Tuesday – Friday: 2-7 pm Saturday: 10am-1pm; 2-7 pm + info: www.veracortes.com / www.vhils.com
