VR Exhibition Visits

Mónica de Miranda: The Island

POSTED: 29 June 2022

Take a virtual tour of The Island, Mónica de Miranda's new exhibition at Autograph contemplating the complex experiences of Afrodiasporic lives, relationships to the land and colonial pasts

VR visit

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Curated by Renée Mussai and Mark Sealy

Using film and photography, artist Mónica de Miranda deploys the metaphor of the island as a utopian place of isolation, refuge, and escape: a space for collective imaginings that speak to new and old freedoms. Anchored in cultural affinities and ecofeminism, the artist considers soil as an organic repository of time and memory, where ancestral and ecological trauma linked to colonial excavations continue to unfold.

Contemplating the complex experiences of Afrodiasporic lives and Europe’s colonial past The Island urges us to develop a more conscious relationship between our bodies, the past and the lands we inhabit – and all that they hold – towards regenerative possible futures. Fusing fact and fiction, The Island explores a long trajectory of black presences in Portugal by bringing together intertwined narratives – drawing on African liberation movements, migratory experiences, and identity formations through a black feminist lens.

The VR tour below can be viewed on your screen or with a Google Cardboard type headset. The Island is on until 22 October 2022, find out more about the exhibition here.

about the artist

Mónica de Miranda

is an Angolan Portuguese visual artist, filmmaker and researcher who works and lives between Lisbon and Luanda. Her work – which incorporates photography, video, drawing, sculpture and installation – investigates postcolonial politics of geography, history, and subjectivity in relation to Africa and its diaspora through a critical spatial arts practice. 

Often conceptual and research-based, de Miranda is interested in the convergence of socio-political narratives, gender, and memory at the boundaries between fiction and documentary.

De Miranda is affiliated with the University of Lisbon where she is engaged on projects dealing with ethical and cultural aspects of contemporary migration movements linked to lusophone Africa, such as Post-Archive: Politics of Memory, Place and Identity, and Visual Culture, Migration, Globalization and Decolonization.  She holds post and undergraduate degrees in art and arts education from Camberwell College of Arts and the Institute of Education in London, and a doctorate in Visual Art from the University of Middlesex. De Miranda is a co-founder of the artist residency project Triangle Network in Portugal and in 2014, she founded Hangar – Center for Artistic Research in Lisbon

Her works have been exhibited internationally, including at the 12th Berlin Biennale (2022); Bienalsur – International Contemporary Art Biennial from the South (2020); Houston FotoFest Biennial (2020); Lubumbashi Biennale (2020); Dakar Biennale (2016); Bamako Encounters African Biennale of Photography (2016); and the 14th Architecture Biennale of Venice (2014) as well as in museums and galleries such as the Pera Museum in Istanbul (2017) and Caixa Cultural in Rio de Janeiro (2017). Her work is represented in public collections including The Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT), The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Lisbon, Portugal.

You can follow the artist on Instagram and see more of de Miranda's work on her website.

Read More

Limited edition print: Whistle for the Wind (2021)

Whistle for the Wind, from The Island, 2021
Commissioned by Autograph. Supported by Art Fund.
Edition of 8 + 2 AP
Exclusively available from Autograph




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with art fund support

supported by

Banner image: Installation view of Mónica de Miranda: The Island exhibition at Autograph, London. 24 Jun – 22 Oct 2022. Curated by Renée Mussai and Mark Sealy. Photograph by Kate Elliott.

Discover more image: Mónica de Miranda, Whistle for the Wind [detail], from The Island, 2021. Commissioned by Autograph. Supported by Art Fund.