Belo Campo

Solo exhibition by Hannah Rowan at Belo Campo
18 Sept—22 Oct 2020
Curated by Alice Bonnot

Triple Point is a solo exhibition by British artist Hannah Rowan whose practice reflects on the contrast between constant, fast-paced human activity and the much slower rhythms of geological processes. Her work, often inspired by living nature, not only observes these natural systems; it re- embodies them.

Evaporation, condensation and precipitation, Rowan recreates ephemeral natural systems in a continued state of becoming to reflect on their fragility. She explores notions of fluidity,
transformation and interconnectivity to speak of the existential threat and anxiety surrounding the climate crisis in connection to other cosmological forces such as technology and data overload. Informed by the Hydrofeminism of Astrida Neimanis,* she invites us to reflect on our presence as and with bodies of water. To slow down, engage and connect to wider ecological systems.

For her first solo exhibition in Lisbon, Rowan presents a new body of work that captures the moving quality of water, frequently between states of matter. By building on the existing attributes of Belo Campo, an old underground wine cellar, the exhibition aims to simulate a slippery groundwater dependent ecosystem, comparable to subterranean wetlands and caves dripping sounds of water permeating through lithic surfaces.

The first two rooms hold Flowing as Frozen a glass and ice condensation piece. The ice placed inside the hand blown glass vessel begins as a solid crystal, melts into a flowing liquid, before cooling and condensing within the glass amorphous solid.

Resonating within the cavernous acoustics of the second chamber, the video Anatomy of Ice is the documentation of a performance Rowan developed in Svalbard during the Arctic Circle Residency (2019), an artist-led research expedition. With a hydrophone submerged in the ocean, she was able to capture the loss of ancient air bubbles that once trapped in the ice became frozen archives of the atmosphere.

In the third room, the atmospheric conditions of Belo Campo shape the material transmutations for Saturation Point, a sweating salt and copper mist piece echoing the continuous circulation of water in the Earth-atmosphere system. In return, the steel sculpture, scaled to the artist’s body, exaggerates the humidity of the room by staging alchemical reactions between materials acting upon each other.

While navigating below ground, the viewer encounters water merging through physical states. Each work amplifies the humid and moist atmospheric conditions of the three adjoining chambers, and blurs the boundaries of the three main phases of the water transformation cycle — solid, liquid and gas. Such phases can coexist at the same time if a certain degree of temperature and pressure is reached. A unique combination that scientists call: Triple Point.

* Intersectional feminist scholar, author of Bodies of Water, Posthuman Feminist Phenomelogy (2017). Bloomsbury Academic.

For The Corner Piece in Lisbon, Ligia Dias brings together artists that have an innate or symbolic relationship with Portugal. The works are displayed in the concrete cubes of Belo Campo.

The Corner Piece is a play on words referring to the store and the exhibition. The project wishes to be interdisciplinary and puts together conceptual and craft practices. The principle is to invite artists, designers and creators according to productions they have made within or at the edge of their framework. In a spirit of transversality, the project questions the notion of artistic field, the subjective value of a given object (be it art-work or product), as well as the exhibition form in itself.

A project by Ligia Dias with: Bless studio, Marta Costa Reis, Ligia Dias, Raquel Dias, Jorge Dias,Patrícia Domingues, Julien Fronsacq, Jenna Kaës, Katie Lagast, LRC designers, Vera Pinto.

SAM M LUNG

Selected objects and works from the Missika Schönfeld Collection
Part 1, curated by Adrien Missika
with: Saâdane Afif, John M. Armleder, Kinga Kielczynska, Fabian Knecht, Isa
Melsheimer, Steve Paul Steven Paul, Mandla Reuter, Sophie-Therese Trenka-Dalton
Exhibition February 15 – 20 April, 2019

Fundação Belo Campo
This exhibition is the starting point of Belo Campo’s damp basement as a museum space. The Missika Schönfeld Collection has been relocated from Berlin to Belo Campo’s friendly host, Galeria Francisco Fino. Belo Campo will present a permanent exhibition of sorts, which will be intersected by temporary projects. Guests will be invited to curate new presentations of the collection on an irregular basis. This project’s set of rules is arbitrary, temporary, unstable, playful, and wishes to engage with legitimate and dissident cultural structures.
Belo Campo faces climate challenges of its century: being underground and sitting on a riverbed which can rise at any
moment. Its humidity level fluctuates between 85% and 100%, hence, and since we are rather serious about conservation matters, all delicate works may be displayed sealed in vacuum transparent bags.

1+1= 3
Our collection relates to love, the partnership of two people in space and time, in life, translating often into the collectivization of their interests and things. Therefore, it articulates bits of the history of each of us before we met, as well as the one building from our shared life.
As in our case, an artist couple’s collection grows out of works exchanged with artist friends, with peers. The notion of value here doesn’t wish to be quantifiable or monetized. Works are exchanged or given on different occasions such as a birthday, a wedding, a friends-visit or an exhibition. Our collection is not only an art collection: we also collect objects that embody personal obsessions.
Sarah and I have put this collection together and, although there is intention poured in it, there is also chance – some works are gifts from beloved friends and, even though they were not “selected”, they are warmly welcomed in the
collection. This chance quality resembles the French saying “On a les amis que l’on mérite” (“one has the friends one deserves”) or, in this case “we have the collection we deserve”.

SAM M LUNG
combines objects carrying different status, which have in common the emotional value bestowed on them. All of them have achieved enough emotional relevance to be kept close, archived and now shown for the first time. Some are objects gifted by friends, most are artworks and others are things gathered overtime, like the set of “Almost Spherical Stones” collected in nature one by one. The narrative driving this exhibition is non-linear, as opposed to the horizontal display of suspended shelves. We hear a polyphony of tales emerging like a choir, and more voices await to join.