Portuguese artist Ângela Ferreira will take part in the Diriyah Biennial of Contemporary Art in Saudi Arabia, which opens on Monday with around 90 artists from around the world on show, according to the organization.
Entitled “After the Rain”, the contemporary art exhibition, which runs until May 24, has Ute Meta Bauer, who directed the Art and Culture department at MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as artistic director, and Wejdan Reda, Rahul Gudipudi, Rose Lejeune and Anca Rujoiu as co-curators.
Ângela Ferreira will take part in the “Zip Zap Circus School” project (2000-24), a collaboration with Saudi artist Mohammad Alfaraj and choreographer Nouf Salamah, founder of the Relevé dance studio in Riyadh, which involves creating a new performance of this structure with children.
In this edition, the theme of the biennial is a “combination of practices such as inhabiting, cultivating, harvesting, searching and sharing”, and features works “that relate to the human-nature continuum, examine the built environment, observe the state of the landscapes that surround us, tell stories and encourage us to listen more carefully”.
Born in 1958 in Maputo, Mozambique, Ângela Ferreira studied fine arts in South Africa and obtained a master’s degree from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town.
He currently lives and works in Lisbon and teaches at the Faculty of Fine Arts, where he obtained his PhD in 2016.
With his work, which mainly focuses on the impact of colonialism and post-colonialism on contemporary society, he represented Portugal at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007.
The list of artists at the Saudi biennial also includes, from the Portuguese-speaking world, Paulo Tavares, a Brazilian architect and researcher who in 2017 created Agência Autonoma, a platform dedicated to urban research and intervention, and who has been teaching design and visual cultures at various universities in Latin America.
Tavares is a long-time collaborator with the Forensic Architecture collective, was a researcher at the Canadian Center for Architecture (2018-2019) and co-curated the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019.