AJF Live with Marta Costa Reis, Monica Gaspar, and Patricia Domingues
August 28, 2024, 12 p.m. EST (New York City time)
Free and open to all.
Register here.
Our speakers will talk about the international collective exhibition Madrugada – Jewellery and the Politics of Hope, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution that put an end to 48 years of dictatorship in Portugal. “Madrugada” (Daybreak) owes its name to a beautiful poem by Portuguese poet Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen about the end of the dark days of totalitarianism. Both the poem and the title of this exhibition appeal to that moment of total possibility, of infinite potential that was felt at the dawn of the Revolution. The objective of this curatorial exercise was to explore jewelry and the act of adorning the body as a political instrument of restructuring, detail, care, and activism.
The exhibition aims to show the vitality of the political expression of contemporary artistic jewelry, through transgenerational, transdisciplinary, and transcultural visions, revealing diverse understandings, in a comprehensive approach to what political jewelry is today. It is pertinent to consider adornment as a political gesture, as reflections of our interconnection with material, conceptual, social, biological, and technological structures that can lead we humans to reconsider our evolution (and even our revolutions) in ways that are not anthropocentric. By confronting and denouncing major gaps in societies, objects—and in particular jewelry—are not passive agents, but actively mediate our experience of the world as a social and political fabric that, being reparative, permeates emerging ideas and contemporary forms of protest.
Caption: Work by Matt Lambert, photo by Eduardo Sousa Ribeiro
