Exhibition: João Fonte Santa. Welcome to Fear City
Curated by Sandra Vieira Jürgens at MAAT, Lisbon
Dates: 28.02 – 30.04.2018
Throughout his trajectory, João Fonte Santa has created a substantial body of work in painting, drawing and video in which he addresses, critically and playfully, various events of the social, cultural, political and economic zeitgeist, by reproducing and subverting images that circulate in the media. Drawing on the power of visual representation and on the metaphorical expression of many of those images, his work questions in an effective and disturbing way, narratives, ideological positions and world visions that define contemporaneity, proposing interpretations which resist and surpass the prevailing value system.
In follow-up to the project O Colapso da Civilização [The Collapse of Civilisation], 2016, an author’s book in which Fonte Santa worked on the period of crisis in Portugal, from 2012 onwards, the exhibition Welcome to Fear City assembles a body of works from João Fonte Santa’s recent production, where the artist works on international politics, the neoliberal project and vision of the world, the economics of fear, the waves of crisis and collective states of shock — caused by wars, terrorist attacks, financial collapses, natural and industrial disasters —, and which have led to the general destabilisation that defines our times. These new series of works evoke association relationships of newspaper, television and Internet images with the fields of popular culture, either with fringe pop music or with B-movies, but also with narratives and aesthetical atmospheres inspired by 19th century literature or by the thinking and action of philosophers — such as Gramsci, Adorno, Chomsky and Naomi Klein —, authors that summon challenges that are always present in the making of a different future.
Link: https://www.maat.pt/en/exhibitions/joao-fonte-santa-welcome-fear-city
