Being Postmodern in Portugal

From the 1970s onwards, postmodernism came to designate a loss of confidence in the narratives of truth and progress underpinning Western culture. Freed from modernism’s earnestness and pursuit of originality, art adopted a distanced tone: kitsch, pastiche, and quotation acquired legitimacy. Artists ceased to invent new forms in order to recombine what already existed, changing their relationship with history. For Fredric Jameson, postmodernism is the cultural condition of late capitalism, centred on the circulation of images and the obsolescence of the new.

In Portugal, this condition took on particular contours as the country negotiated tradition and the future following the dictatorship and with its accession to the EEC. The exhibition takes Belém as a key to reading this transformation, from the fire at the Galeria Nacional de Arte Moderna in 1981 to the creation of Centro Cultural de Belém in 1993. It presents a contextual perspective on Portuguese visual arts: a network of intersections and contradictions rather than a single narrative. The term was embraced by some and rejected by others, and the exhibition reflects this uneven diffusion.

Curadoria Marta Mestre