ANTI-ISTO: MANIFESTO POEMA opens on 26 February at MNAC

agenda

DATE

24 Feb 2026

AUTHOR

Umbigo

ANTI-ISTO: MANIFESTO POEMA opens on 26 February at MNAC

AUTHOR

Umbigo

Launched in 2022, the partnership between the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), the Millennium bcp Foundation, UmbigoLAB and the Master's Degree in Curatorial Studies at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Coimbra has been promoting the articulation between theoretical learning and the concrete challenges of curatorial practice. The proposals developed by the students have focused on the dialogue between works from the MNAC and Millennium bcp Foundation collections and creations presented in the context of UmbigoLAB.

The fourth edition of this partnership has given rise to the exhibition ANTI-ISTO: MANIFESTO POEMA, curated by students from the Master's Degree in Curatorial Studies (Afonso Agostinho, Bárbara Braga, Lia Falcão, Mafalda Arnaut, Margarida Nuno Oliveira, Rita Barqueiro, Tiago Leal and Tomás Saraiva), under the guidance of curator, artist and lecturer Ana Rito.

Developed from the motto of António Pedro's proto-poem, the exhibition is presented through a mise-en-scène understood as the language of space and movement. The project takes the exhibition space as an alternating plane of events, based on a staged reflection on the gaze, which involves the visitor in the reconfiguration of the off-screen space and repositions them as part of the scene itself.

Operating in a sensory shift that extends to the haptic – according to Marie-José Mondzain's formulation of “making-see” – the exhibition explores a sensitive territory as a condition for welcoming the ungraspable that the image transforms. In this borderline place, where the exercise of seeing seems saturated, the viewer is taken up again as an active subject, misled to the same extent that they reveal themselves.

Through the creation of a scenographic device of situated actions – updated by immediate gestures that are sometimes antagonistic to the exhibition protocol – new passages and exercises in deprogramming are configured. Perceptual anaesthesia, legibility and visibility are challenged, establishing a dynamic of improvisation and sensitive sharing that inscribes the visitor in a living and fragmented flow of perception.

The project also counts on the collaboration of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Art Library and will also have an editorial spin-off in Umbigo #95, developed in partnership with the Cultural Section of the Spanish Embassy in Portugal, on the theme of Borders.

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