By Pedro Mbinza
The Luso-Angolan artist, Pedro Pires, inaugurates this Thursday, May 20, in Luanda, as part of the celebrations of the “Day of the Portuguese Language”, an exhibition called “The Long Life of Straight Lines.
The exhibition, with free admission and open until May 26, is part of the program of celebrations that Camões – Portuguese Cultural Center is dedicating to May 5.
This date is dedicated to the Portuguese language and marks the artist’s solo return to the Angolan capital after several years of a growing presence in the international art circuit.
“The exhibition has the artistic direction and production of the Luso-Angolan contemporary art gallery This Is Not A White Cube, the first African gallery in Portugal that, while maintaining a deep connection with Africa, does not focus exclusively on Lusophone circles, but mainly on the emerging aesthetics of cultural, artistic productions from the Global South,” the institution stated.
With a set of 23 works, mostly unpublished, of sculpture and intervention on paper, the appropriation of the title of the homonymous essay by Wolfgang Döpcke, “The Long Life of Straight Lines” (1999), provides a critical analysis of the stereotypical narratives surrounding the definition of border lines in Africa, in an exhibition with curatorial text by Luísa Santos.
Pedro Pires, through reference to the work of Wolfgang Döpcke, reflects that his work has long proposed around the notion of border and the fragmentation of identity.
With information from Forbes