Contemporânea

Cindy Sissokho: I think that the word 'institution' is used so frequently in our sector, I hear it every day — and it still doesn't have a clear definition in my mind, this word representing such a monolithic and power dynamic structure that I believe takes multiple shapes, mutates and reinvents itself in echo or contrast with many factors (social, cultural, economic, environmental, etc.). This/these word(s) shift(s) and mean different things from one place to another — in our cases, from the place that we enunciate it, the word 'institution' maintains a strong Eurocentric connotation. Words are translated as and when needed, and sometimes it is impossible to truly communicate how we all shape our world(s).

The online glossary we're developing together is a platform to collectively interrogate the words that populate and direct our practices in this sector, and that are important in the shaping of culture as a political tool. It is a platform that will be built collaboratively with partnering institutions and diverse publics across several years. I see it as a study of current practices, languages, and ways of living and existing — as an ongoing, open and fluid dialogue.

So for me, languages are foundational to my curatorial practice - they are the formats and methodologies of producing knowledge and culture. I have a deep interest in artistic creation, and this interest continuously shapes the ways in which I think and work. My curatorial practice has mainly focused on practices and perspectives that remain systemically on the margins of larger socio-cultural and political frames, and more broad hegemonic narratives. This vision is core to the collaborations I undertake: from exhibition-making to writing, from mentoring and delivering seminars to producing artistic residencies and publications. Because, similarly to the various definitions of words, I believe that working through visibilizing and implementing existing and new knowledge and questions — that otherwise still remain overlooked — holds strength by taking many shapes in constant transformation, by being untranslatable and harder to define while impacting narratives, people, and places. 

Carolina Fontes: The FAS Collection began in 2016, when Mariana Champalimaud and Rui Horta e Costa, who come from a finance background, took a closer look at a client’s art collection and noticed a significant presence of artists from the African continent and its diaspora. Around the same time, they started going to some of the major Art Fairs with focus in African art, such as 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in Marrakech, sparked by a growing interest in the work of these artists.

Over time, Mariana and Rui’s vision of what an art collection — and the role of a collector — led them to acquire part of the collection and establish FAS – Forward Art Stories. From that point on, FAS took shape as more than a private initiative. Mariana and Rui became committed to building a project with international reach, grounded in partnerships and collaboration — not simply a personal collection to be kept at home.

I joined FAS in 2023, drawn by a shared interest in the cultural, political, and historical perspectives embedded in the work of African artists. Since then, our commitment to deepening our understanding of the collection — and to supporting diverse artistic and curatorial voices like Cindy’s — has become central to FAS’s mission.

Today, we operate from our office in Lisbon, where most of our projects are developed. More recently, we opened the FAS Project Space in Luanda — a space closely connected to the local artistic community, made possible through the generous support of our advisor Mehak Vieira, who runs the gallery Jahmek Contemporary. Being physically present on the continent is a vital part of our mission, and this space reflects our long-term commitment to supporting and engaging with artistic practices in Africa.

CS: This exhibition is the outcome of many threads in my curatorial research process — I was defining themes from existing bodies of work from the collection. My ideas usually come the other way around, I think from concepts, ideas, questions, and concerns, and then I think about existing or new artistic forms.

When I started researching the collection for the purpose of this exhibition, I let myself be guided by the works gathered under FAS — for me, a collection must be understood as a body of work that tells the story of a specific gaze, a specific look. It is a curatorial platform drawn from a broad landscape of artistic practices. The collection features multiple threads of conversation, and sometimes resonates with other works. So I was weaving together art forms and historical discourses from one artwork to another. It was about mapping and drawing connections to understand more closely the body of work the collection embodies, and the stories it tells.

My curatorial practice also focuses on bridging transnational narratives, and it was natural for me to think beyond the collection. I wanted to break down this sometimes monolithic idea of the African continent and its global diaspora. Because it isn't static, it is untranslatable, complex and ever shifting, politically and conceptually, I wanted to invite other artists — for example Gabriel Chaile, who is from the north of Argentina and moved to Lisbon about 4 years ago in the middle of the pandemic. His symbolic presence in the exhibition, with his sculpture ¿Por qué has corrido tan lejos? (2024) draws unexpected connections with many artists in the collection such as Sandra Poulson or Teresa Kutala Firmino.

CF: For me, some of the most unexpected (yet very powerful) connections in this exhibition emerge from the ways the artists’ practices intersect across geographies, temporalities, and personal or political memory — which are core themes in the works of the collection — and this exhibition allowed them to resonate in ways that felt both intimate and expansive.

There is a strong presence of artists from the diaspora like Grada Kilomba, Frida Orupabo, and Hank Willis Thomas, whose works interrogate historical trauma, colonial memory, and the visibility of Black bodies through archival and conceptual strategies. In contrast, artists such as António Ole and Kiluanji Kia Henda explore post-independence realities and urban transformation in Angola, offering equally critical perspectives often grounded in materiality and architectural language. There is also a constellation of artists — including Délio Jasse, Edson Chagas, and Kiripi Katembo — whose photographic practices manipulate reality and memory, somehow shifting the viewer’s sense of place and time.

One of the most meaningful aspects of producing this exhibition alongside Cindy was witnessing how these works communicate with one another through shared gestures: erasure, repetition, layering, irony. These gestures echo and reinforce our mission: to cultivate a collection that goes beyond representation, toward dialogue, complexity, and critical engagement.

CS: The museum's location, and more broadly the city, were a fundamental element for me to reflect on for this exhibition in parallel to several of the artist's works connecting to the politics of the city. I have been coming to Lisbon regularly for over four years now, and I have seen it transforming so rapidly, while also understanding the racial, economic, and class stratification that the city embodies. We only have to observe the daily movements of the city, who lives where and how, to realise that Lisbon reproduces the same regime of violent urban stratification as cities such as Paris and London, which I know very well.

For example, the work by Kiluanji Kia Henda titled Padrão dos Descobrimentos (2006), traces a direct connection to the neighbourhood — I wanted the work to be in relation to the monument itself, located only 10 minutes from the museum. His work is a radical and political take on this monument whose presence is a continuous glorification of a colonial past, and therefore a normalisation of the legacies that are still embedded in today's societal infrastructures in Portugal. Not only does this work visibly reflect on this ongoing history, but it also continues to create a language that counteracts and subverts, but also amplifies a powerful space for the presence of racialised people that otherwise remain silenced, and whose stories remain untold or distorted.

I wanted this exhibition to be current and local, as well as international, by emphasising a spatial and architectural look of the works in the collection — a key theme that for me was very present within so many of the artists' works. Again, here in the context of my curatorial practice, I am committed to reframing, bringing new perspectives and reactivating conversations that are crucial to the survival of people and their environments. This exhibition attempts to bring this, while also showing how the presented artists are actively working with fiction, myth, tales and other subtleties to anchor themselves, to be present, to exist and to remain visible through their work in the public realm.


CF: I see the presence of contemporary African art in the context of this space and its histories as something very significant, particularly given the venue’s layered colonial past and its current role as a public institution for contemporary art. The building’s history and surrounds inevitably add a charged context to any exhibition it hosts. This is especially true for artists that are part of the FAS Collection, many of whom are actively engaged in interrogating post-colonial memory, migration, identity, and resistance.

This dialogue between past and present is extremely necessary in Portugal, where the colonial legacy remains a complex part of the national narrative. Within that context, the FAS Collection sees its role not just as a collector of artworks, but as a platform for visibility, exchange, and critical engagement. Exhibiting these artists in such a space — and doing so publicly, through collaboration with Galerias Municipais — aligns with our mission of supporting artistic practices that ask difficult questions and create space for new perspectives.

CS: Yes, these notions of myth and imagination are important and run as a red thread throughout the exhibition — for me, the surrounds join this notion of survival, reinvention, subversion, and agency that activates new conversations around the cultural and political histories of people in Africa and from the diaspora. It mirrors[1]  a city like Lisbon.

It is not only pointing the fingers at the colonial myths and imaginaries that have allowed the possibility of historical violence and theft, that sustained and continue to revive myths. Here, I refer to the ghosts from the past that are resurfacing such as the horrifying rise of fascist politics, the strengthening of hostile immigration policies, and the normalisation of racial and class stratification of the city of Lisbon, among others. But it also reflects on the fact that, in spite of this unstable political landscape, people are still able to find ways to live and reinvent over and over again. So, this idea of myth in the exhibition makes space for a reflection on the binary of political imagination that saves us but also destroys us. It is a wake-up call for the urgent need to gather, to think about shifting narratives with more urgency than ever in diverse approaches.

CF: What I find to be one of the most meaningful aspects of From the surrounds, we build the present is how Cindy’s curatorial proposal brings AbdouMaliq Simone’s concept of the “surrounds” into dialogue with the works in the collection — particularly through her view of myth as a tool to imagine and reimagine histories. Her curatorial choices highlight how many of these artists engage in reconstructing personal and collective memory, often from positions shaped by displacement, marginalisation, or colonial legacy. That said, I won’t go too deeply into this, as I believe Cindy will be able to articulate her vision and approach on Simone’s concept much more clearly and insightfully than I can.

CS: As mentioned above, for me it was crucial to think outside of the collection to draw connections with the works that are a part of it. I always love to create links across spaces, whether conceptual, geographical, or even cultural. For example, the work of Gabriel Chaile's piece ¿Por qué has corrido tan lejos? (2024), was a way to create 'unusual' connections. I always admire how Chaile works with traditions (materials, cosmologies and tales) alongside the realities of the everyday, and how he builds communities through the creation of his works — it is a powerful way to create critical and political engagement within cultural production while bringing sustainable collective agencies too. In the works of Délio Jasse's Esgotada (2024), and accompanying rich archives, Jasse works on the recovery of memory, escaping a frontal confrontation by using rather subtle modes of representation of his own family histories, in the context of Angola.

Both of them strongly join other artists in the collection, and more importantly, complement them. So, it is this idea of an ever-expansive community and solidarity that I was interested to include in this exhibition, and more broadly in the collection.

CF: For FAS, remaining open to voices and narratives beyond the collection itself is fundamental. A key aim of the collection has always been to foster dialogue — not only among the works we hold, but also with artists and practices that expand or challenge our thinking. In the past, we have supported and commissioned several projects by artists outside the collection as a way to extend and enrich both our mission and the ecosystem we are part of. Including invited artists in our projects is therefore not new — and it’s an openness we remain committed to.

It was particularly meaningful to collaborate with both Gabriel Chaile’s studio, especially during the installation and restoration of his monumental sculpture ¿Por qué has corrido tan lejos? (2024), and with Délio Jasse in the presentation of his  Esgotada (2024) series — part of the Contemporary Art Collection of Lisbon City Council. This presentation was thoughtfully complemented by the artist’s own archival materials, offering a deeper contextualization of the work within both the collection and the exhibition.

Cindy’s curatorial approach emphasized the importance of these contributions, and for us at FAS, it reinforced our belief that the collection is not a closed system. It evolves not only through acquisitions, but most importantly through dialogue, collaboration, and exchange. This openness is central to our mission and reflects how we see the role of a collection today: as a living, dynamic platform for critical engagement.