Ovo Celeste

Ovo Celeste, Daniela Ângelo’s solo exhibition at Casa da Cerca, opens 4 May, at Convento dos Capuchos, Almada. Until 14 September, don’t miss the chance to see the artist’s most recent body of work.

Daniela Ângelo’s work can be read as a visual reflection on, on the one hand, the process of building museum collections over time and how they define and shape our history and, on the other, how we perceive the different archives that form our individual and collective identity - in an exercise on the perception of perception. 

In any exhibition, museum or collection, an object or image is just one fragment of a dense and complex whole. An archive is an accumulation or superimposition not only of these objects, but also of many others that exist only as evocations or echoes of the past and potential futures. It is also a superimposition of the readings we make of objects, of how we signify them, how we value them or, in the opposite direction, how we devalue and discredit them. 

Daniela Ângelo creates images that portray a vision of archives, of museum collections, as a construction made by the accumulation of times and geographies. A construction of the past and present that questions linear history and proposes alternative narratives marked by displacements, juxtapositions, and reappearances. The artist reinforces our position as spectators - we are double spectators: of her works and of the images she portrays - she always leaves us on the other side of the shop window, observing an object we don’t know, and which is foreign to us. Reflections, other images, spectres are superimposed on this field of vision (his and ours). The image, any image, is always an accumulation of many images - some physical, some mental, many fictionalized. 

Similarly, in our atlas of thoughts, the images that survive, those that our memory keeps, lose their absolute form, lose context, becoming an amalgamation of different fragments, a visual fiction that distances what we see from both what we captured and what we remember later. In this way, our memory, the images and stories we keep, are always fabricated, always a construction and superimposition. 

In this set of photographs, Daniela Ângelo manages, in a unique way, to make tangible the way we perceive the world and how we construct the images we accumulate. — Filipa Oliveira

Convento dos Capuchos

Rua Lourenço Pires de Távora
2825 Caparica