João Penalva at Culturgest: Characters and Players

article

DATE

10 Jul 2026

AUTHOR

Katya Savchenko

João Penalva at Culturgest: Characters and Players

AUTHOR

Katya Savchenko

“Curated by Bruno Marchand^[1], the exhibition at Culturgest focuses on João Penalva’s body of work that he has been developing since the mid-1990s, following the transition from painting to spatial projects that often incorporate a variety of materials and resemble particular formats of display, such as a presentation of an archive, an old-school foyer exhibition, a cinema, or a crime scene reconstruction.”

Let us imagine a situation that might take place within João Penalva’s major solo show Characters and Players, at Culturgest in Lisbon. Say, a person enters the exhibition space without any advance knowledge of this prominent artist’s practice spanning 50 years. What would such a visitor make of this project while moving through a sequence of twelve separate rooms filled with images, texts, documents, mysterious objects, and sounds, alongside a large-scale textile collage and a display of eight artist books? Most probably, they would be perplexed and perhaps slightly overwhelmed, but also generously rewarded with the pleasure of finding their own way in engaging with Penalva’s stories and strategies without the constraints of prior explanation. For it seems to be in the very nature of João Penalva’s practice to offer carefully constructed yet subtle and, at times, disorienting clues to his projects, while leaving the visitor free to draw their own conclusions – or, rather, to trust their imagination.

Curated by Bruno Marchand^[1], the exhibition at Culturgest focuses on João Penalva’s body of work that he has been developing since the mid-1990s, following the transition from painting to spatial projects that often incorporate a variety of materials and resemble particular formats of display, such as a presentation of an archive, an old-school foyer exhibition, a cinema, or a crime scene reconstruction. Characters and Players features Penalva’s seminal works from this period, including Widow Simone (Entr’acte, 20 years) (1996), created for the XXIII São Paulo Biennial. The exhibition at Culturgest takes place alongside other initiatives in Lisbon, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s practice: a programme of his films at Cinemateca Portuguesa and the restaging of The Ormsson Collection presented by João Penalva at Pavilhão Branco, accompanied by the quest across four Lisbon Municipal Galleries, Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar, and Culturgest, with a prize from the artist for piecing together the puzzle.

Despite not being part of the Culturgest exhibition per se, The Ormsson Collection feels inseparable from the conceptual focus of Characters and Players. In this project, developed for Pavilhão Branco in 1997, João Penalva positioned himself as curator, rather than an artist. In doing so, he took on the task of familiarising audiences in Lisbon with a peculiar collection of art and artefacts belonging to the late Icelandic collector Loftur Ormsson. Only at the very end of the exhibition, where the provenance of the works was listed, could an attentive visitor discover that Loftur Ormsson was an imaginary figure and that the "collection" ( nevertheless featuring real artworks), was probably envisioned by João Penalva himself. The ambiguity of this visitor experience was captured by the curator and art writer Guy Brett, who wrote: “The pleasures of this show, for me, lay in the state of uncertainty it played on. I was not so credulous that I did not wonder if Penalva had invented Ormsson; nor was I so initiated that I did not feel that Ormsson could be real”.^[2] In the same article, he described Penalva’s intention in this project as “to point out and therefore to question what he [Penalva] calls ‘the aura of museological authority in the fabrication of a truth’”.^[3]

João Penalva's practice does not appear as direct institutional critique, but rather as a broader exploration of the archive's capacity to construct a certain version of reality or “truth”. This subject persists as a recurrent interest, alongside employing the distortions and disturbances of said reality as his artistic tools, both of which run throughout the works in Characters and Players. While The Hair of Mr. Ruskin (1997) once again engages more directly with the legitimising authority of the museum, exhibiting, as the story goes, a lock of John Ruskin's hair together with seven forgeries (one of which was subsequently stolen), other projects, such as Widow Simone and Wallenda (1997–1998), present Penalva’s own archives. These archives, featuring Penalva’s correspondence, notes, scores, photos and research materials, were collected during his attempts to study the well-known clog dance of Widow Simone from Frederick Ashton’s ballet La Fille mal gardée, and to create a whistle version of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (in Wallenda).

Different as these projects may be, both narrate Penalva’s laborious journeys, where setbacks and lucky, at times coincidental, discoveries become equally formative. In making Widow Simone and Wallenda, the artist underwent rigorous training, faced the possibility of failure, and arrived at outcomes that may not have been envisaged at the outset but emerged through the process itself. Wallenda is named after the famous high-wire artist Karl Wallenda, who fell to his death after losing his balance during a performance. In his project, Penalva includes a video fragment of the ill-fated performance, showing Wallenda wobbling on the tightrope, but not his fall. From this fragment alone, unaware of Wallenda’s ultimate fate, might we instead dream that he simply learned how to fly?

The layout and the nature of the materials that constitute João Penalva’s works, alongside their presentation in separate rooms at Culturgest, lend them the character of exhibitions in their own right. João Penalva himself, however, categorises these projects as installations^[4]. In her examination of installation art, the art historian and theorist Claire Bishop argues that what defines an installation is that its meaning emerges through the relations between its elements, with the individual components remaining secondary to the whole. She finds equally important the position of the viewer, whose experience is shifted from distant observation to an embodied, spatial mode of engagement^[5]. Bishop further identifies a particular type of installation art, which she terms a “dream scene”. She suggests that the experience of certain installations, such as Ilya Kabakov’s total installations, resembles dreaming, in that both unfold through conscious sensory perception, readily fall apart into fragments, and are best interpreted through free associations rooted in one’s personal affective domain rather than through external logic^[6].

This alignment between dreaming and engaging with installation art offers a useful lens through which to approach João Penalva's projects. Some of his works, such as Light Beam (2007), Petit Verre (2007), and On stage a fig tree (2009), in which mysterious luminous objects or surreal structures emerge from the darkness before the viewer, evoke a distinctly dreamlike atmosphere. Other pieces, including Men Asleep (2012) and Pavlina (2007), refer to dreaming more directly in their subject matter. The latter presents, through a synchronised slide and film projection, a study of a dream about a moth recounted by Pavlina, a retired entomologist. More fundamentally, Bishop argues that what distinguishes “dream scene” installations is not simply their capacity to immerse the viewer in a three-dimensional environment, but, like dreams themselves, their ability to become psychologically absorptive.^[7] Submerged in the experience, the viewer may become its protagonist, an engaged explorer, a player assuming different roles, or move between all these positions at once, much as one might in a dream. Indeed, this was very much how I experienced João Penalva’s projects.

While writing this text, I made two long visits to Characters and Players. The night after my second visit, I dreamt that my research had exhausted every detail and every connection to be found within João Penalva’s installations at Culturgest, and that his works appeared before me transparent in their meaning, as if naked. I woke up relieved to find that they had not.

Curated by Bruno Marchand, the exhibition is on view at Culturgest until July 19, 2026.

^[1] Bruno Marchand, formerly Curator of Visual Arts at Culturgest, became Deputy Director of MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in March 2026.

^[2]Guy Brett, ‘Elasticity of Exhibition: Landmark Exhibitions Issue’, in Tate Papers no.12, 2009 https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/12/elasticity-of-exhibition, accessed 2 July 2026.

^[3] Ibid.

^[4]João Penalva, email to the author, July 2026

^[5] Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (London: Tate Publishing, 2005).

^[6] Ibid., pp. 14–16.

^[7] Ibid.

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