The Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos was born in Paris in 1971. As an artist Vasconcelos is interested in reviving the surrealistic ready-made, mixing it with a certain sense of Noveau Réalisme and Pop, she often starts out from ingenious operations of displacement. This can be seen in her site-specific art shows which are artistic interventions over pre-existent areas. Joana Vasconcelos places her works in dialog and confrontation with different spaces, decorations, themes, and histories. In her art, Vasconcelos appropriates, decontextualizes, and subverts pre-existent objects and everyday realities to challenge the prearranged routines of daily life. Her work engages in an investigation of gender, class, and national identities through the media of sculpture, installations, assemblages, video, and photography. This way of conceiving art becomes particularly clear in her show in the gardens and the inside of the chateau of Versailles in 2012 and in her project for the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), which determined the affirmation of her career within the international art circuit.

Joana Vasconcelos

Evoking the 1960s Nouveau Réalisme movement, Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, and the symbolic, tactile constructions of Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse, Joana Vasconcelos threads everyday objects and materials together in her assemblages, which comment on womanhood, nationality, and consumerism.

For the 55th Venice Biennale Joana Vasconcelos created a floating pavilion in the form of a typical Lisbon ferry boat. The work's title was Trafari Praia, it addressed the historical relationship between Portugal and Italy, which evolved through trade, diplomacy, and art. The exterior of the boat was covered with panels of tin-glazed, blue and white, hand painted ceramic tiles, called ‘azulejos’, which depicted a contemporary view of Lisbon’s skyline.

The work takes its inspiration from another large-scale panel of azulejos, ‘The Great Panorama of Lisbon’, which depicts the city before the legendary earthquake of 1755 and is a quintessential expression of the golden age, when the baroque-style azulejos were produced in Portugal. This edition is a cutout of this beautiful scene which depicts the Tower of Belém and parts of the historical city.

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“ They are blue and white tiles that make up a drawing of the city today. There’s an old factory that still produces them the same way it did before, hand-painted, very traditional. I like their texture and tactile quality. „

—Joana Vasconcelos