Carla Cruz

Showing: The Inauthenic Male

Curatorship: Aida Rechena e Teresa Furtado

Museums are not neutral places. On the contrary they seek answers to key questions. Gender as one of individuals’ identity dimensions is comprised in those questions.

Gender is a sociocultural construction of identity imposed by social norms with the aim of transforming people into women or men while having real consequences in their lives, namely in the access to wealth, prestige and power. But this construction of distinct gender roles is simultaneously a personal choice that results in a broad and fluid range of gender identities, such as heterosexuality, lesbianism, homosexuality, transsexuality, intersexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, among others, thus becoming an act of freedom, diversity and individual expression.

Gender is not something that people possess, but something that is being built every minute, continuously in all situations of daily life, in permanent interaction with others, in the way individuals think, communicate and act.

Body, sexuality, identity and resistance are the dimensions present in the daily construction of Gender that lead this exhibition. In an attempt to undo stereotypes regarding the understanding of Gender, the exhibition brings to the museum a reflection and debate on the Gender dimension, based on a set of works by Portuguese artists Alice Geirinhas, Ana Pérez-Quiroga, Ana Vidigal, Carla Cruz, Cláudia Varejão, Gabriel Abrantes, Horácio Frutuoso, João Gabriel, João Galrão, João Pedro Vale e Nuno Alexandre Ferreira, Maria Lusitano, Miguel Bonneville, Thomas Mendonça e Vasco Araújo.

See here

Very excited to announce that I will be part of a working group – a small assembly of people brought together to study a situation or problem, reporting on what has been discovered – Constellations gives eight artists the opportunity to come together to study socio-political contexts as the site for their artistic practice.

Group members: Beverley Bennett, Connie Butler, Ting-Ting Cheng, Edmund Cook, Carla Cruz, Sophie Hoyle, Gal Leshem, Camara Taylor.

Running from October 2017 – May 2018, the group will explore different methods and approaches to artistic research and community-orientated practice, through a series of day-long monthly workshops hosted by Flat Time House. Each session will be led by an invited guest, the first four guests include; Ain Bailey, Jasleen Kaur, Rory Pilgrim and Rehana Zaman – the other workshop guests will be invited by the group.

Alongside the workshops, there will also be budget and curatorial support to programme two public events, the form and content of which will be shaped and determined by the group collaboratively.

The programme will support artists to develop their practice, collaborate with others, access new networks, and spend time at FTHo as a place to study and research between the monthly workshop sessions.

Constellations has been conceived by UP Projects in collaboration with FTHo and draws on the history of John Latham’s house as a site of experimental art education where students, artists and the wider public can come together to test the boundaries of what is teachable and knowable.

Over the course of three days, Market Gallery will host numerous arts organisers, artists, journalists, writers, economists and activists from across Scotland & the UK. Initiated partly as a response to losing two of our gallery spaces at the end of May, we want to problem-pose the underlying issues behind the allocation of resources and property within the arts & wider cultural sphere. The aim of the forum will be to understand and critique the structural complexities and collectively search for potential alternatives or solutions.
The forum will be free and will invite responses from both invited speakers and the public. It will address our increasingly fragile ecology of arts, culture & media from a range of perspectives:

- Who and what determines how cultural resources are distributed, and for what purposes?
- What are the effects of privatisation on the arts?
- How can we actively transform art, work & culture for the better?
- How can we build radically new forms of collective, cross-cultural organisation?