Autograph is loaning one photograph from our collection by artist Mónica de Miranda to be part of the 2025 Capture Photography Festival Public Art Program. The photograph will be sited on one of seven billboards in Vancouver, Canada.
Angoloan-Portuguese artist and filmmaker Mónica 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.
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.
Contemplating the complex experiences of Afrodiasporic lives, relationships to the land and colonial pasts
Read moreBanner image: Mónica de Miranda, Whistle for the Wind, from The Island, 2021. Commissioned by Autograph. Supported by Art Fund.
Images on page: 1) Mónica de Miranda, Whistle for the Wind, 2021 Courtesy of the Artist Photo: Dennis Ha. 2) Courtesy Mónica de Miranda. 3) Mónica de Miranda, Whistle for the Wind [detail], from The Island, 2021. Commissioned by Autograph. Supported by Art Fund.
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