knell dobre glas

The starting point for the exhibition were the texts about art written by Jean Genet, in which he discusses the works of a sculptor (Giacometti), a painter (Rembrandt) and a funambulist (Abdallah Bentaga).

The desire to extend questions related with the intersection between the artistic and the political sphere led to an expansion of the exhibition not only until an evocation of the writer’s biography, namely his defences of the Black Panther Party, the cause of the Palestinian people and the immigrant rights – not forgetting his homosexuality neither his multiple imprisonments –, but also until an attempt to work the concepts of death, truth and beauty, through the presented works.

Therefore, the works that are proposed reflect the dialogue held among the artists and writers involved in the exhibition, which will have a catalogue with new texts by Rui Baião and Rui Nunes. It may be observed that knell dobre glas, as the title suggests, was constructed having as reference the thinking of Jacques Derrida, namely the book Glas, written in 1974, the year of the Portuguese revolution. In this book in particular, the philosopher, in parallel columns, confronts Hegel – whose dialectical thinking constitutes a defence of the values represented by the Law understood as a result of an ethic based on family, civil society and state – and Genet, the antithesis of this social body.

Two other books had inspired the process of constructing knell dobre glas: Genet, by Edmund White, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, edited by Julie Ault.