Triple Point by Hannah Rowan

Documentation of the solo exhibition Triple Point by Hannah Rowan curated by Alice Bonnot at Belo Campo, 18.09.2020 – 15.01.2021
photos by @photodocumenta

Hannah Rowan – Triple Point, Installation view at Belo Campo
Hannah Rowan – Triple Point, Installation view at Belo Campo
Hannah Rowan – Flowing as Frozen I, 2020
Hannah Rowan – Flowing as Frozen I, 2020
Hannah Rowan – Flowing as Frozen II (detail), 2020
Hannah Rowan – Flowing as Frozen I, 2020
Hannah Rowan – Triple Point, Installation view at Belo Campo
Hannah Rowan – Flowing as Frozen I, 2020
Hannah Rowan – Triple Point, Installation view at Belo Campo
Hannah Rowan – Triple Point, Installation view at Belo Campo
Hannah Rowan, Anatomy of ice, 2020, video, 14’06”
Hannah Rowan, Anatomy of ice, 2020, video, 14’06’
Hannah Rowan, Anatomy of ice, 2020, video, 14’06’
Hannah Rowan – Flowing as Frozen II (detail), 2020
Hannah Rowan – Flowing as Frozen II (detail), 2020
Hannah Rowan – Triple Point Installation view at Belo Campo
Hannah Rowan – Flowing as Frozen II (detail), 2020
Hannah Rowan – Flowing as Frozen II (detail), 2020
Hannah Rowan, Saturation Point, 2020
Hannah Rowan, Saturation Point (detail), 2020
Hannah Rowan, Saturation Point (detail), 2020
Hannah Rowan, Saturation Point (detail), 2020
Hannah Rowan, Saturation Point (detail), 2020

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.

Triple Point

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.

The Corner Piece, a project by Ligia Dias, opening September 13th 2019 22h

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

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.

Água Viva by David Horvitz opening Monday 14 May 2018- 6-9 pm

Água Viva

David Horvitz
Belo Campo
exibition 14 May-28 July 2018
opening on Andreia’s birthday

On the shore of the Pacific Ocean in Palos Verdes, California I attempted to transcribe (with the Roman alphabet) the sounds of the water crashing against the shore. I wanted to create a compositional score that can be performed by human voice. The vibrations of our vocal chords with the air exhaled from our lungs simulating the sounds of water, sand and rocks.

On May 13th sitting on the rocks in Praia da Azarujinha the scores were performed by a group of people. We read the sounds of the Pacific to the Atlantic, like a letter from one ocean to another, like a dialogue between two bodies of water, with voices collapsing distance.

Underlined in a Rachel Carson book somewhere on my bookshelf in my home in Los Angeles is a paragraph that discusses the chemical similarities between human blood and sea water, a remnant of life’s origins in the sea.* I imagine that inside our body we carry the sea wherever we go. But maybe it is not us that are carrying the sea, but the sea who has shaped itself in our form.

The scores in the exhibition were made with watercolor, ink, pigment, tap water, sea water, and sea salt. Visitors are encouraged to perform the scores, bouncing their voices through the concrete rooms of Belo Campo.

David Horvitz

*When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life carried with them a part of the sea in their bodies, a heritage which they passed on to their children and which even today links each land animal with its origin in the ancient sea. Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal – each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water. This is our inheritance from the day, untold millions of years ago, when a remote ancestor, having progressed from the one-celled to the many-celled stage, first developed a circulatory system in which the fluid was merely the water of the sea. In the same way, our lime-hardened skeletons are a heritage from the calcium-rich ocean of Cambrian time. Even the protoplasm that streams within each cell of our bodies has the chemical structure impressed upon all living matter when the first simple creatures were brought forth in the ancient sea. And as life itself began in the sea, so each of us begins his individual life in a miniature ocean within his mother’s womb, and the stages of his embryonic development repeats the steps by which his race evolved, from gill-breathing inhabitants of a water world to creatures able to live on land.

Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us, 1950.

Diana Policarpo – Dissonant Counterpoint – 26.01-01.03.2018

Gina Folly – Follow You – 11.11.2017-17.01.2018