Catarina de Oliveira’s practice incorporates film, sound, performance, text and textiles, theatre and dance. Through the use of stylized imagery, restrained formal compositions and fragmented narratives, her artworks seek to investigate how different power structures operate and their manifestations through social and political rituals, along with inquiring how certain narratives or myths became part of a community’s history. De Oliveira’s practice is populated with characters, locations, objects and memories that are not stable and fully crystallized entities. She is invested in creating and hosting poly-vocal narratives that can question each other, in order to call attention to mostly white male, colonial, anthropocentric and heteronormative agendas. By creating the stage for these different voices she questions if truths in which a story claims to be anchored perhaps only exist as truths immanent to the formulation of this (historical) narrative. Her aim is to create forms and compositions that embrace temporalities, ontologies and epistemologies and that exist outside normative modes and that resonate with the vibrations of other beings and entities.
Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include: 2016 “A Devorar o Contíguo (Devouring the Contiguous)” Quadrum, Lisbon, “Né”, TANK, Marseille (exhibition with Amandine Guruceaga) and 2015 Catarina de Oliveira; Gustavo Sumpta”, Ar Sólido, Lisbon. Other exhibition venues include: NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein (DE); CIAJG (PT), Serralves (PT), HEAD (CH), TENT, Rotterdam (NL) among others. Her performances have been shown at La Ferme du Buisson (FR), Parkour (PT), Bonheur Theater (NL), and The Watermill Center (US). Awards and residencies include: 2017 Gasworks Residency Program, London (UK); 2015 Budapest-Lisbon Artist Residency Exchange Program, Budapest History Museum (HU); 2013 Triangle France Residency Program, Marseille (FR); Gulbenkian Grant for the Visual Arts – International Program (PT); 2012 Artist in Residence at The Watermill Center, New York (USA); and Kunsthuis SYB (NL).
