Vhils — Prisma

Alexandre Farto, aka Vhils, presents at maat, a monumental and unexpected proposal relying solely on video, which is a language that the Portuguese artist has been exploring more recently. Prisma is an exhibition that consists of a number of images of everyday life in nine major cities: Beijing, Cincinnati, Hong Kong, Lisbon, Los Angeles, Macao, Mexico City, Paris and Shanghai, where the artist has carried out, over the last few years, important public art works.

This large-scale installation, comprising slow-motion footage projected on screens that transform the museum’s Oval Gallery into a veritable urban labyrinth, affords the visitor a truly immersive experience, in a construction that manipulates and distorts the effects of space, scale and light.
 
Developed in a global context, prior to the pandemic crisis, the installation involves us in banal environments where the individuality of each city, along with the identity of its inhabitants, is lost. However, by roaming these anonymous spaces, visitors are given the chance to recover autonomy through a critical distancing that results in an exercise of contemplation, introspection and reflection on a recent past that seems, after all, so far away.