15/4- 21/4, 2023
Armandina Ferreira
Artist: Anabela Veloso
Veloso’s solo show at Don’t look at me gallery is not entirely her own. She shows me the invitation postcard where the description Armandina Ferreira’s… is crossed out, and instead there is the word Solo, a solo show with Anabela Veloso and her grandmother Armandina Ferreira. Maybe a solo show is never entirely a solo show, but here it is more obviously not one. Armandina Ferreira has things to say. She can’t be silenced even though Veloso tries to have a last word.
It’s the first try-outs of a series to come where Veloso intends to investigate her’s and her family’s background. She plans to develop more works on how Armandina Ferreira’s life, and her subsequent generation can illustrate a parallel to current events. With this show, we are zoomed in. Veloso is presenting a timeline of archived photographs of Armandina Ferreira and the people around her. Some of the frames have no photographs, but are filled with burgundy colour. Veloso’s audioguide tells us how it could have been using a combination of her memory, memories told to her by others and her imagination.
This is a memorial of Armandina Ferreira and her life. She lived a challenging life brought up in the dictatorial state of Salazar in Portugal. Salazar created a trilogy of national education. It was taught to her and she taught it to Veloso, who resisted. The propaganda was stuck in her even after it had stopped. She kept repeating its ideologies.
This show is a continuation of their relationship: their complex combination of love and care on one side, and confrontation, discipline and tension on the other. Veloso tells me that she loves, forgives and is starting to understand her grandmother.
“How can one display torture, manipulation, and everlasting generational trauma when no physical bruise is left as proof? How can one tell or pass on a testimony of something intangible and intimate to someone’s body and psyche? How can one disclose traumatic violence through images that, at a first encounter, do not reproduce it? Trauma that becomes part of the status quo of a family even after almost a century. This exhibition focuses on the portrait of my grandmother Armandina in a collection of family memories, speculative images, and historical events that shape the ghost of her identity.”
– Anabela Veloso
Don’t look at me gallery
Curated by Kajsa Karlsson
Don’t look at me gallery is an exhibition series that takes place in a basement in Amager. The gallery has a limited visibility, which gives the artists the opportunity to show works that they might not really want to show. I expect it to be personal, uncertain, fragile, unresolved and with a great risk, maybe even a risk of it being bad. The address is somewhat secret, the opening hours are spontaneous, variable and sometimes impractical. Those living in the house above the basement are invited, but beyond that, communication about address and time are limited. For this show we decided to send out thirty-two invitations by mail via postal service.