Anozero’24 Bienal de Coimbra

This edition of the Bienal de Coimbra titled “THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY” and curated by Ángel Calvo Ulloa and Marta Mestre, explores the idea of liberty and the strategies of contemporary art to challenge, displace, and inhabit it. The title has an ambiguous and open meaning. If, on the one hand, it suggests the idea that liberty is a phantom, an inescapable and spectral presence, on the other hand, it also points to a postponed process, emphasising the hallucinatory production of a desire.

The celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution (1974) is part of this equation, and here we can reflect on its potential for historical imagination, as well as its gridlocks (the eerily fractured echo of one of its slogans, “Peace, bread, housing, health, education”). Similarly, we also seek to evoke another revolution by celebrating the centenary of the Surrealist Manifesto (1924). Like Fantômas — the fictional hero created by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain — hovering over the rooftops of Paris, the phantoms evoked in this Biennial have a poetic value: they seek to hijack historical events from their conventions and crystallised readings, and to provoke suspension and movement, the very qualities of ghosts.

Apr 6 – June 30, 2024