The MNAC and Duplacena are proud to present for the 9th year an exhibition dedicated to the loop as a seminal form of the moving image.

Loops.Expanded 2023-2024 edition in Portugal features six works selected through its international open call. From poetry to artists’ formal and philosophical viewpoints, this selection deconstructs and reconstructs on this essential form of the moving image.

Opening the cycle in Duplacena77 is in search of Averrois, where Portuguese João Cristóvão Leitão weaves a majestic construction of the circularity of memory. In a second room, two short works are juxtaposed: THE DUCHAMP MANIFESTO («Besides, it is always the others who die»), by Spaniard Fermín Díez de Ulzurrun, , a cautionary tale of causes and consequences of deep fake; and the pandemic Notebook of the Plague – a critical, personal and intimate view by Terry Berkowitz, a North American video artist active since the 1970s.

At the MNAC, three works will be shown consecutively. The first is the iconic experimental videoart work 0778, by Brazilian Marcellvs L., a poem operating from the transition from analog magnetic to digital language in a long shot that jiggles with time, space and perception. In Chantier (2023), French artist Cyril Galmiche explores his ideas of simultaneity, superimposition and objective relativization of reality, by choreographing over 2h30 the movements of a construction site. And Blind Spot by Portuguese artist Helena Ferreira, is an installation that plays with the materiality of light and the possibility of considering images in and out of focus as the most paradoxical of loops.

Alisson Avila and Irit Batsry