LUMIAR CITÉ

Júlia Ventura
Irreparável
17.05 – 03.08.2025

Info
Press-Release (port)

17.05 | 17h Opening of the exhibition
17.07 | 19h Lecture with Sabeth Buchmann

Júlia Ventura, Agente de Fronteira Tunisino, 2008

Júlia Ventura is an internationally renowned artist based in Portugal and the Netherlands. Over the course of her career, which spans five decades, she has developed one of the most impressive bodies of work in the Portuguese art scene. For her exhibition at Lumiar Cité she has developed an installation that for the first time brings together new photographic works with what she calls ‘objects of interest’.

In her installation Irreparável, Ventura merges several groups of work. Two large-format photographs sit in a long line of her well-known explorations of visual philosophies. Here, her appearance in front of the camera by way of a staged self creates a tension that derives from photography’s traditional claim of representing reality. Paradoxically, by over-performing in these works she approaches the real through the abstract.

These images are juxtaposed with others captured in Tunisia, a country with which the artist has close personal ties, and that have a political-documentary as well as autobiographical meaning. These works are contextualised by 500 Arabic women’s names that are listed in Arabic at the beginning of the exhibition. Applied by the artist to the glass façade facing the street, the signs remain abstract shapes because they are left untranslated into Western script.

Standing outside, the Arabic text can be read from right to left (or, as those used to Western languages are used to, from left to right), forming a mirror image of the names for visitors inside the gallery. These double perspectives are reinforced by a mirror in the gallery that makes the text legible for visitors inside the space, without them necessarily being able to understand it. Ventura’s adjustment of perspective underlines her focus on signifiers, where these seemingly abstract forms gain intelligible meaning, or content.

Juxtaposing her complex philosophical-autobiographical negotiation of phenomena with camouflaged political ‘objects of interest’, here these seemingly banal objects operate with a tension that arises from their revealed origin and their apparently laconic positioning in the space.


Júlia Ventura (Lisbon, 1952) lives and works in Lisbon and Amsterdam. Her solo exhibitions include the following venues and institutions: CAV – Centro de Artes Visuais, and Colégio das Artes (all Coimbra); Centro Cultural de Belém, Culturgest, and Fundação Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva (all Lisbon); Gemeentelijk Museum (Arnhem); Kröllër-Müller Museum (Otterlo); MAMCO Genève; Museu de Serralves (Porto); Museum Fodor (Amsterdam); and Villa Arson Nice. His group exhibitions include the following venues and institutions: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado, and Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes (all Lisbon); Institut Néerlandais (Paris); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid); Shanghai Biennale; and Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam).