Solo show curated by Renée Mussai and Mark Sealy
Autograph is developing a solo exhibition of newly-commissioned work by Angolan-Portuguese visual artist and filmmaker Mónica de Miranda. Her research-led practice is grounded in themes of urban archaeology and affective geographies at the convergence of politics of gender, memory and space – drawing on postcolonial narratives and artistic strategies of subversion.
De Miranda's most recent project, The Island contemplates 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, African liberation movements, migratory experiences, and identity formations through a black feminist lens.
Using moving and still image, De Miranda deploys the metaphor of the island as a utopian place of isolation, refuge, and escape: a backdrop for collective projections that speak to new and old freedoms. Intimately anchored in personal cultural affinities and notions of ecofeminism, the artist considers soil as a continuously morphing, organic repository of time and embedded memories, where ancestral and geological trauma linked with colonial excavations continues to unfold in circular movements. For De Miranda, soil sits in dynamic relation to social human structures, urging us to develop a more conscious relationship between our bodies, the past and the land – and all that it holds – towards regenerative possible futures.
The exhibition features two new Autograph artist commissions seen for the first time: a 35-minute film work The Island, and an associated photographic series part of Autograph’s 2021 project ‘Amplify – Stranger in the Village: Afro European Matters', supported by the Art Fund.
https://autograph.org.uk/exhibitions/monica-de-miranda-the-island
Autograph
London, UK