Joana Vasconcelos: I’m Your Mirror Joana Vasconcelos

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents the exhibition Joana Vasconcelos. I’m Your Mirror, a selection of thirty works produced between 1997 and the present day by the most internationally rep uted Portuguese artist, including a site-specific installation for the Atrium of the Museum and various other new works. In this show, sponsored by Seguros Bilbao, viewers can submerge themselves completely in the universe of an artist with a direct and humorous vision of the world, whose work explains many of our society’s contradictions without any apparent effort.
Some of Joana Vasconcelos’ works are extraordinarily complex: they move, make sounds, or light up. These complications are resolved by the artist in her 3000 m2 Lisbon studio with the assistance of a team of more than fifty permanent collaborators. Vasconcelos uses a wide variety of materials from everyday life to make these works, such as household appliances, tiles, fabrics, pottery, bottles, medicines, urinals, showers, kitchen utensils, telephones, cars, and plastic cutlery. With them the artist constructs light-hearted yet strikingly direct images that refer to socio-political issues relevant to post-colonial, globalized and consumerist societies, addressing issues that range from immigration to gender violence.