Joana Vasconcelos

Joana Vasconcelos, ComIH (born 8 December 1971), is a Portuguese artist. Her participation in the 2005 edition of the Venice Biennale affirmed her career within the international art circuit with the piece A Noiva (The Bride), a 20 ft. high chandelier made of over 25,000 OB tampons [1]. Moments such as her presence in Japan’s Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial, in 2006; “Contaminação”, exhibited in 2008, at Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, in Brazil; or the group exhibition Un Certain Etat du Monde? A Selection of Works From François Pinault Foundation Collection, presented in 2009 at the Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture in Moscow, led to a notable international career. She was also in the grand retrospective, “Sem Rede (Without a Net)”, in 2010, at Museu Colecção Berardo in Portugal.

She was born in Paris, France, but lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal.

Much of Vasconcelos' work deals with feminism, as well as social and political issues. Vasconcelos appropriates, decontextualises and subverts pre-existent objects and everyday realities into sculptures, installations, performances, and video or photographic records, to reveal an acute sense of scale and mastery of color, while combining in the materialization of concepts that challenge the prearranged routines of daily life. Vasconcelos' operations of displacement, a reminiscence of the Ready-made, Nouveau Réalisme and Pop, provide a vision that is complicit and critical of contemporary society and the notions of collective identity, especially those related to the status of women, class distinction or national identity. This process originates a discourse around contemporary idiosyncrasies, where the dichotomies of hand-crafted/industrial, private/public, tradition/modernity and popular culture/erudite culture are imbued with affinities that are apt to renovate contemporaneity's usual fluxes of signification.

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