Untitled (speechless)

looped video, 10 min.

20.03.12 – 24.03.12. Shown daily from 20:00-22:00

at The Bookshop – projectspace window

Untitled (speechless) by Fernando José Pereira (Porto, 1961), current artist in Residence at Skaftfell – Center For Visual Art.

Untitled (speechless)

is a work about dissatisfaction and reality. The video contains only a fixed plan of a room with a very long table with chairs on both sides. The plan was taken in central perspective and the image suggests a strange connection to paintings from the renaissance period. A person moves from chair to chair sitting only for brief moments in a gradual climax of dissatisfaction until being tired of it and ending stopping himself in what appears to be a signal of giving up. There isn’t any aperture on the plan neither any change of image only the actor in a continuous moving around the table with the characteristic sound of the drag of the chairs.

A quote by Jacques Rancière resume this work in a brilliant phrase:

“A suitable political art would ensure, at one and the same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny by that which resists signification.”

Fernando José Pereira has a degree from the Fine Arts School of Oporto, Portugal and a PhD in Fine Arts from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Pontevedra, Spain. Most of his work consists of video, photography and drawing. The main subject of work is connected to the theme of nature as a cultural human construction, mediated by politics. The last years Fernando has developed almost all work around the idea of decay/ruin as a form of allegory.

For more detailed information go to the website:

http://www.virose.pt/fjp