The Member
Bienal Fotografia do Porto
The Bienal Fotografia do Porto is a platform for artistic research, exhibition-making and public engagement dedicated to photography and its expanded relationships with contemporary culture, ecology, society and other fields of knowledge. Organised and produced by Ci.CLO, the Bienal brings together national and international artists through exhibitions, residencies, research laboratories, conversations and public programmes presented across museums, cultural institutions and public spaces in Porto. Each edition explores photography as a critical and relational practice, capable of questioning the visible and invisible structures that shape how we see, feel, inhabit and act in the world. Many of the projects presented emerge from long-term processes of artistic research, developed in dialogue with territories, communities, institutions and interdisciplinary partners. Through its programmes, the Bienal Fotografia do Porto seeks to foster alternative perspectives, ethical imagination and regenerative cultural transformation, creating spaces for reflection, experimentation and encounter. The Bienal is supported by a network of public, institutional and strategic partners, including national and international organisations committed to contemporary photography, artistic research and cultural change.
Nominations
Discover the artists selected by
Bienal Fotografia do Porto
since
2022
The Ci.CLO Plataforma de Fotografia / Bienal Fotografia do Porto nominations for the FUTURES Platform bring together five emerging artists: Eunice Pais (Mozambique/Portugal), Francisco Menezes (Portugal), Guillermo Vidal (Venezuela/Portugal), Jungeun Lee (South Korea) and Maria Peixoto Martins (Portugal).
The Ci.CLO Plataforma de Fotografia / Bienal Fotografia do Porto nominations for 2025 Futures Platform are Inês Quente, Emanuel Constantino, Jessica Gaspar, João Bragança Gil and Patricia Assis.
The five Portuguese emerging artists represent independent conceptual and material trajectories in the expanded field of photography. The curatorial team identified innovative investigations that address aspects of contemporary life and the built and natural environments. The artists’ portfolios investigate the role of documentary photography and notions of what comprises ‘reality’ in the captured or recorded image; the place of the archive in relation to the fictive space where liminal states can be characterized as transitional and intermediate: pictorial language re-imagined, media manipulated and deconstructed.
The Ci.CLO Plataforma de Fotografia / Bienal Fotografia do Porto nominations for 2024 Futures Platform are Teresa Freitas, Rui Costa, Maria Beatriz de Vilhena, Katya Bogachevskaia and João Ramilo. The curatorial team recognises that each of the five artists, all based in Portugal, expands the visual language of photography and its impact on contemporary culture through their investigations into the power of documentary photography, the role of memory in autobiographical narratives, notions of faith as a universal human need, emigration and the emotional impact of the war and the socio-crisis in rural territories.
All of the artists invited to participate in FUTURES 2023 by Bienal Fotografia do Porto are strongly connected with a Portuguese background. With interpretive visions which expand the visual language of classical documentary photography, each of these artists are exceptionally gifted in the field of image making, especially in subjective and symbolic ways.
Having joined the FUTURES network in 2021, this edition marks our first nomination of talents – for which we’ve decided to choose artists who can genuinely grow through the network’s activities. Equally, we believe these authors can enrich the FUTURES artistic community with their original projects and unique experiences.
As Ci.CLO runs its core activities in Portugal, three of our five FUTURES talents are primarily active domestically. In line with our social, environmental and political emphases, their projects have clear socio-political contexts, rooted in multi-layered sociological and ecological narratives. The remaining nominees come from Belarus and Ukraine respectively, reflecting our efforts to support artists from European countries suffering from conflict and oppression.
