Luisa Cunha's Work and the Voice of the Feminine
Conversation with Luisa Cunha, Joshua Decter, Colectivo FACA, and Isabel Carlos (moderator)

This roundtable will establish a dialogue between Luisa Cunha's work and the book Luisa Cunha. Obras / Works 1992–2022, launched at the opening of the exhibition Hello! Are You There?, with underlying themes of contemporary art, transdisciplinarity, the word, language, and topics surrounding the construction of identity and the deconstruction of feminine sexuality.

Created in 2019, the Colectivo FACA, led by Andreia Coutinho and Maribel Mendes Sobreira, is a curatorial and active citizenship project that critically examines visual culture narratives.
“We think about the themes of feminism, colonialism, racism, LGBTQI+ and non-normativity in general in museum spaces. All these issues have the same root, a prejudice towards that which is not equal to us, making us feel threatened, branching out into themes considered marginal. It is urgent to retell History because the predominant narrative does not coincide with individual and collective narratives, which have always been disregarded. Considering that these ideas are being developed internationally, we bring the discussions into the Portuguese cultural debate relying on specialized and non-specialized audiences. Not erasing history, we cross the various narratives, pulling the margins to the centre of the debate.” – Colectivo Faca

Joshua Decter is a writer, curator, and art historian. His books include Art Is a Problem: Selected Criticism, Essays, Interviews and Curatorial Projects (1986–2012) (JRP Ringier, 2014), and Exhibition as Social Intervention (Afterall Books, 2014). Decter has contributed to Artforum, Art Review, Mousse Magazine, Texte zur Kunst and other periodicals, and has authored numerous international exhibition catalogue essays since the 1980s. His recent essays include “Politics Burned a Hole Through My Heart”, in What About Activism? (Sternberg Press, 2019), and the 2020 “Thinking About How to Think Again” (Kunsthalle Vienna, online). Decter has curated exhibitions at MoMA PS1 (New York), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Center for Curatorial Studies / Hessel Museum of Art Bard College, Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), among others. Since the 1990s, Decter has taught at the University of Applied Arts (Vienna), the School of Visual Arts (NYC), the University of Southern California (Los Angeles), and many others.

Luisa Cunha was born in 1949, in Lisbon, where she lives and works. With a degree on German Philology at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, she concluded in 1994 the Advanced Course in Sculpture at Ar.Co – Centro de Arte & Comunicação Visual, Lisbon. Heir to the dematerialising experiments in international art of the 1970s, Luisa Cunha has exhibited her work since 1993 in institutions like the Serralves Museum in Porto, Culturgest in Lisbon, and the QuARTel – Galeria Municipal de Arte, Abrantes, among others. In 2021 she was the winner of the EDP Foundation Art Grand Prize, and, in 2023, was awarded the AICA/MC/ Millenium BCP Award for Visual Arts.