Vancouver, Canada

Grounding

14 Mar - 25 May 2025

Past Off-Site Curation
Curated by Mark Sealy, organised by Capture Photography Festival

ABOUT THE display

Launched in 2013, Capture Photography Festival is Western Canada’s largest lens-based art festival. Annually in April, lens-based art is exhibited at dozens of galleries and other venues throughout Metro Vancouver as part of the Exhibition Program. The Festival acts as a platform to expand visual literacy through lens-based art; strives to give voice to traditionally underrepresented communities and to present compelling, urgent lens-based art.

Autograph's Director Mark Sealy has curated seven billboards of artist Mónica de Miranda's work to be part of the 2025 Capture Photography Festival Public Art Program.

De Miranda's research-led practice is grounded in postcolonial politics in relation to Africa and its diaspora. For Autograph’s commissioning project Amplify – Stranger in the Village: Afro European Matters, de Miranda created a new series of photographs titled The Island, contemplating the complex experiences of Afrodiasporic lives and Europe’s colonial past. 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.

Address

Arbutus Greenway
St 1654 W 6th Ave
Vancouver, BC V6J 1R3

past display

This curation is now closed, view our current displays and exhibitions here

display

Sited on seven billboards along the Arbutus Greenway between Fir St and Burrard St, Vancouver

curated through autograph

Autograph has more than 30 years of curatorial expertise in photography and film addressing issues of representation, identity, social justice and human rights.

Working on exhibitions off-site from Autograph's gallery in London, our curators bring Autograph's knowledge and ethos to projects in the UK and abroad.

DISPLAY PREVIEW



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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

Banner image: Mónica de Miranda, Whistle for the Wind, from The Island, 2021. Commissioned by Autograph. Supported by Art Fund.

Display preview, all image photography by Dennis Ha: 1) Mónica de Miranda, Whistle for the Wind, 2021. 2) Mónica de Miranda, Formation, 2017. 3) Mónica de Miranda, Groundwork, 2022. 3) Mónica de Miranda, Three sisters, 2022. 4) Mónica de Miranda, However Long the Night The Dawn Will Break, 2024.

Other images on page: 1) 
Courtesy Mónica de Miranda.