The exhibition "Ritual Bodies" was inaugurated at Alfaia, in Loulé, on September 18th at 6pm. The show is curated by David Revés and Nicolai Sarbib and brings together the works of Christine Henry, born in Porto in 1958, and Joana Coelho, from Lisbon born in 1998, two artists from different generations and contexts whose practices find deep resonances in the relationship between body, nature, animality and memory.
The exhibition departs from ritual as an ancestral form of relationship with the unknown and with what exceeds rational experience, questioning the ways in which the human body recognizes itself as part of a broader network of existences and forces. Ritual is understood not merely as a set of codified gestures or procedures, but as a mechanism of transformation and connection between the individual world and external reality.
Christine Henry, based in the Algarve since 1981, develops a multidisciplinary practice that spans photography, painting, sculpture, installation and video, exploring tensions between Nature and the Human, Nature and History, Absence and Presence, permanence and impermanence. Joana Coelho mainly starts from drawing to construct interior landscapes and hybrid figures where mind, body and spirit intersect, exploring states of metamorphosis and continuities between the human and other forms of life.
The exhibition will be on display at Alfaia — Art and Community until November 7th, proposing to think of ritual as an approach to what remains uncontrollable in bodies and, at the same time, an opening to other possibilities of relationship with the world.
