CARLA REBELO

“Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” is the name of a very well-known painting by Paul Gauguin created in 1897. I think more about its title than about the painting itself when I now briefly present Carla Rebelo’s approach to the archaeological collection of the Abade Pedrosa Municipal Museum – International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture, and to the archaeological remains in the municipality that range from the Paleolithic to the Contemporary Age. And I think, above all, that when we look at her work, we realize how the order of this triple question is not arbitrary.

It reveals how her interest in matters, the way they transform into materials and then objects, is not casual, and how this attraction is based on an interest in the cumulative process of knowledge developed in the slow and long time of tradition, of the overlapping of cultures, in the adaptation and metamorphosis of collective memory, a much more dynamic reality than we often grasp and which decisively marks a place and its different times.

Carla Rebelo knows that objects speak. They speak of their types of production, of who produced them, for whom they were produced. And she knows that discovering this is to find, in each time, an economic construction, a social organization, a political hierarchy, deeply rooted in historical processes and their contradictions. It is because of this delicacy and shrewdness with which she looks at the “Where do we come from?” – which a museum with this historical depth obliges us to do – that her approach becomes intensely contemporary. Contemporary not because it emanates from the present, which in itself does not guarantee any contemporaneity, but because that first question is the key to answering the second: the very complex inquiry about “who are we”; and the third, the most dramatic, but also the most hopeful desire to know “where are we going?”.

Celso Martins

Carla Rebelo completed her degree in Plastic Arts – Sculpture from the Fine Arts Faculty of the University of Lisbon in 2000. She has training in Textiles, Set Design, and Drawing. She was awarded with a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in 2010/11. She participated in artistic residencies in Portugal and also in Russia (2013); Madrid (2012); Berlin (2011); and Istanbul (2010) as part of the project “Journey into the Interior of Lived Cities.”

She has been exhibiting collectively since 1999. Her solo exhibitions include: “A Cidade das Tecedeiras”, CAAA, Guimarães (2022); “Geologia de um lugar”, Casa A. Molder Gallery, Lisbon (2022); “Segundo o seu próprio tempo”, Diferença Gallery, Lisbon (2020); “Um momento que se repete continuamente”, Águas Livres 8 Gallery, Lisbon (2018); “Paisagens Privadas”, Diferença Gallery, Lisbon (2018); “Um Pentágono, um Círculo, oito Livros”, São Lázaro Library, Lisbon (2017); “Marca de Água”, Money Museum, Lisbon (2017); “Becoming Water”, Marquês de Pombal Palace, Oeiras (2016); “O destino seguia-nos o rastro como um louco com uma navalha na mão” Nogueira da Silva Museum, Braga (2015); “Um movimento quase impercetível que tem a ver com o voo”, Monumental Gallery, Lisbon (2014).

She is represented in public and private collections, including: the Contemporary Art Collection of the Portuguese State; the Artist Book Collection of the Art Library of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation; Contemporary Art Center, Málaga; Luciano Benetton Imago Mundi Collection; Kronstadt History Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia; Polish Art Foundation, Melbourne, Australia; MG Collection; Figueiredo Ribeiro Collection.