Power – a word of overwhelming scale – is the point of departure of this exhibition. It is a word that defies easy categorization, resisting restriction and fixed definition. It stretches, unfolding across history and through the very essence of longing.

Its immensity makes any attempt at totality impossible. Rather than claiming to be exhaustive, this group show consciously embraces partiality, opting instead to touch on some of the many facets that define this term.

This exhibition operates through intuition rather than hierarchy. Works do not aim to excavate depth in a systematic way, but remain deliberately close to the surface, where symbols circulate quickly and authority is performed, imagined, or distorted. This surface is not shallow. It is charged, unstable, and revealing. Throughout the exhibition, irony functions as a release valve. Its presence sharpens the critical edges while also allowing moments of relief under such intensity.

Some of the works evoke childhood fantasies of authority projected into the future, with children imaging themselves as dictators, where innocence becomes entangled with domination in ways that are both unsettling and absurd. Elsewhere, power is staged through absence rather than declaration. Speeches occur without words, total silence is used to assert authority, creating a sense of tension, expectation, and submission through what is retained rather than expressed. Other works take on darker registers. Prison guards, judges, and administrators of detention centres are portrayed as monstrous or spectral presences, while phantom emerge in deep conversations, reflecting on the invisible structures of control that shape contemporary societies. These ghostly figures do not haunt the past alone, but linger in the present echoing unresolved brutality and enduring hierarchies.

Sound-based works draw on field recordings of drones, which symbolize regimes of surveillance and control over contested lands. These sonic traces operate quietly yet consistently, mirroring forms of power that are both prevalent and nearly unseen. Poems embedded on the walls of historical buildings offer no illusion of hope. They refuse consolation and acknowledge language as a space where violence is recognized as irreversible.

The exhibition also suggests less visible forms of power. The afterlife appears as an extension of control, where belief systems continue to regulate bodies and behaviour beyond death. Technological control is also seen through the quiet power of passwords, access codes, and encrypted identities, revealing how authority today is often exercised through invisible systems rather than physical force.

From childhood fantasies of domination to the imagined regulation of the afterlife, the exhibition traces how power shape bodies and minds within a continuous loop of existence, one in which life itself unfolds under the persistent structures of control.

Joel Valabrega

Curadora do programa expositivo