The artist Ângela Ferreira will participate, with the installation «Zip Zap Circus School», in the 17th Istanbul Biennial (Turkey), considered one of the most important art biennials in the world. The show runs from September 17th to November 20th, curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Amar Kanwar and David Teh.
Directly selected by the curatorial team of the Istanbul Biennale, the work «Zip Zap Circus School» (2000-2002) is a "temporary structure" that "explores the idea of architecture as something one desires or a dream one works towards". . The installation translated a part (at scale 1:1) of the speculative project that the Mozambican architect Pancho Guedes conceived ― presented for the first time in 1996 ― as a solution for the permanent residence of a school for children in Cape Town (the Zip Zap Circus School).
Ângela Ferreira's participation in the 17th Istanbul Biennale has the support of the Directorate-General for the Arts, formalized through an International Cooperation Agreement, within the framework of a strategy for the international promotion of artistic creation and Portuguese creators.
Founded in 1987 and organized by the lstanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (iKSV), the Istanbul Biennale attracts around 500,000 visitors per edition and has as its main objectives the creation of a space for the affirmation of new trends in the field of contemporary art, assuming as a meeting and convergence point, in Istanbul, between artists and audiences from different cultures.
Taking into account the space of reference and cultural and artistic influence promoted by the Istanbul Biennale, the relevance of Ângela Ferreira's participation is underlined, considering the uniqueness and international recognition of the artist's work and career.
Angela Ferreira was born in 1958 in Maputo, Mozambique. He completed his Visual Arts studies in South Africa, obtaining a master's degree at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. She currently lives and works in Lisbon, and teaches at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Lisbon, where she obtained her PhD in 2016. Ângela Ferreira's work revolves around the impact of colonialism and post-colonialism on contemporary society. These investigations are guided by deep research and the filtering of ideas that lead to concise, refined and evocative forms. He represented Portugal at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, where he continued his investigations into how European modernism adapted, or not, to the realities of the African continent, tracing the history of Jean Prouvé's 'Maison Tropicale'. It is still architecture that serves as a starting point for the deepening of his long research around the erasure of colonial memory and the refusal of reparation, which finds its most complex materialization in the work "A Tendency to Forget" (2015) focusing on the ethnographic work by the couple Jorge and Margot Dias. 'Pan African Unity Mural' (2018), exhibited at Maat Museum Lisbon and Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden, was conceived, retrospectively and introspectively, for the “here” and the “now”. In addition to his own trajectory, other biographical stories are simultaneously narrated, exposed and hidden in this work. In 'Dalaba: Sol'Exile' (2019), a work focused on Miriam Makeba, one of the most prominent figures against apartheid, Ângela Ferreira creates several sculptures based on architectural elements of the house of exile where Makeba lived in Conakri, almost like a prototype of the relationship between modernism and African vernacular architecture. His sculptural, sound and video tributes have continually referenced the economic, political and cultural history of the African continent by recovering the image and work of some unexpected figures such as Bob Dylan, Peter Blum, Carlos Cardoso, Ingrid Jonker, Jimi Hendrix, Jorge Ben Jor , Diego Rivera, or Miriam Makeba.