Kunsthalle Lissabon

Kunsthalle Lissabon opened to the public on July 3, 2009, and since then we have presented more than sixty exhibitions and have published twenty-one volumes. We collaborated with numerous local and international institutions and developed a continuous reflection on institutional knowledge and practice in the field of contemporary art. In 2019 we celebrated our tenth anniversary inviting four international partners (Pivô, CURA., S.A.L.T.S., and ICA Philadelphia) to take over the Kunsthalle Lissabon. Not only the space but also our production and communication infrastructure, our resources and even our online presence. We decided to celebrate by simply disappearing from the cultural landscape of the city for one year. We wanted to investigate temporary disappearance as a way of reflecting on the cultural fabric of a city like Lisbon. It has been a very intense year, full of collaborations, experiences and mutual exchanges of knowledge. During this year Kunsthalle Lissabon has continued to produce relationships and not only with the artists, but also with directors, curators and with all the members who make up a team of likeminded institutions. Our goal for the upcoming years is also to guarantee that these relationships will remain permanently active and functional. Radical hospitality will always remain the core of our institution, which is defined by ideas of generosity, solidarity, and sociability. At the same time, we will continue to carry out the solo exhibition, which is almost completely off the list of most contemporary curatorial experiences and rhetoric, and seen as a privileged vehicle for the voice of the artist and not that of the curator, but for us has ended up becoming a preponderant tool in the process of articulation and proposing of an institutional model based on ideas of hospitality, generosity, and sociability. Kunsthalle Lissabon is back. (By the way, disappearing is more work than remaining present).