The artist investigates, with a special focus on photography, personal and institutional archives of specific communities, which she presents in exhibitions and through richly illustrated catalogues. In recent years, she has been working on the memory of Portuguese emigrant communities in the United States. One of these exhibitions (at Ashpit 8, Museu de Electricidade, 2011), entitled New World Parkville, resulted in a catalogue highly praised by critics.

In Mais Alto (which means Higher) her proposal addresses a transcendental issue in contemporary art related to historical questions of post-colonialism. Through interviews and material collections, MC literally portrays a group of female paratrooper nurses from the Portuguese army serving in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. Scenes from their professional and daily lives in Africa, moments of work and leisure. Once again, the aim is to record, recover, and preserve the individual and collective memories of a little-studied and little-known professional group.

The catalogue brings together texts by Margaria Correia, Irene Flunser Pimentel and João Pinharanda, alongside a selection of images that will be on display.

Artist's biography

Margarida Correia was born in Lisbon in 1972, where she currently lives and works in Lisbon. She completed a degree in Painting from FBAUL and obtained a Master's degree in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York. She held her first solo exhibition, Shining, at FBAUL in 1998.

More recently, she presented New World at Carpe Diem Arte e Pesquisa, at the EDP Foundation, at the São João da Madeira Art Centre, and at Real Art Ways in Hartford (USA); Things at Galeria 111 in Porto and Lisbon, and at AIR Gallery in New York; Junk, Voyeur Project View in Lisbon; Saudade, at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids and at Real Art Ways in Hartford (USA). She has participated in group exhibitions at White Columns, Exit Art, Bronx Museum of The Arts, Bruce Silverstein Gallery, Centre for Photography at Woodstock, Dorsky Gallery, ABC No Rio (New York); the Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester), the Print Center (Philadelphia), the Photographic Centre Northwest (Seattle), the Toledo Museum of Art, the Vermont Centre for Photography (USA), Gallery 44 (Canada) and the Cokkie Snoei Gallery (Netherlands). She has also exhibited at the EDP Foundation, Belém Cultural Centre, Espaço Novo Banco, ZDB Gallery, and Porto Municipal Gallery in Portugal.

She has received grants from the AIR Gallery (New York), the Puffin Foundation (New Jersey), the Joyce Elaine Photography Grant (Texas), the Aaron Siskind Foundation (New York); and the Camões Institute, DGArtes, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Luso-American Foundation, Portuguese Centre of Photography, and the Foundation for Science and Technology in Portugal. Her work is represented in the public collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Camera Club of New York, Center for Photography at Woodstock, Grover Collection at Yale University, Real Art Ways (USA), and in the Américo Marques Collection, EDP Foundation, Novo Banco Collection, PLMJ Foundation, and MUDAS Collection (Portugal).