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In the orbit of now

Seventeen galleries, and the feeling that everything is already in motion before you arrive. The Opening section of ARCOlisboa 2026 presents itself as a field of signals: materials thinking, bodies translating, geographies dithering between appearance and dissolution.

Plato (Évora - Porto, PT)
At one end, Eduardo António (Brazil, 1991) compresses memory until it almost collapses: jute holds the image in place like a skin that resists both decay and clarity. Nearby, Hernâni Reis Baptista (Portugal, 1986) refuses that stillness—his bodies leak into animal, plant, and ruin, assembling themselves out of leftovers, as if identity were something always already scavenged. Between them, silence is dense, packed with gestures that never fully settle.

Espacio218 (Santiago de Chile, CL)
Look up (or rather, outward) and the sky fractures into competing narratives. Javiera Gómez (Chile, 1993) pulls astronomy down from its scientific pedestal and hands it back to poets, educators, and thinkers; the cosmos becomes ceramic, mineral, reproducible, political. In Noël Saavedra’s (Chile, 1987) textiles, the same sky folds inward: angels fall through silk, theology collides with gaming iconography, and belief reads like a coded surface. The celestial turns tactile, almost domestic.

Enhorabuena Espacio (Madrid, ES)
And then, almost imperceptibly, the vegetal world begins to interfere. Juan Diego Tobalina (Peru, 1982) inserts plants into the very act of seeing—medicinal species screen-printed onto mirrors, interrupting the self with pharmacological ghosts. Krizia León Porta (Peru, 1996) extends that disturbance: green landscapes thicken into psychological atmospheres, environments that feel less like places than states—humid, unstable, hallucinatory. Botany here is not ornament; it is a nervous system linking body, perception, and mood.

LA BIBI GALLERY (Palma de Mallorca – Mexico City, ES - MX)
That interiority mutates elsewhere. Maite y Manuel (Uruguay, 1996, 1991) turn everyday life into a flickering ecosystem of figures that feel half-remembered, half-invented—colour behaving like emotion, like weather, like refuge. Their paintings do not describe a place so much as they metabolise it: Mallorca filtered through Montevideo, through memory, through a kind of joyful distortion.

Galería Remota (Salta, AR)
Material thickens again with Analy Villagra (Argentina, 1991) for whom weaving is continuity: knowledge passed hand to hand, body to body, resisting a clean reading of legacy. Then Itamar Hartavi (Tel Aviv, 1984) pushes painting toward something slower, almost geological: surfaces that grow rather than depict, expanding like organisms or terrains. The works do not narrate; they accumulate, as if duration itself were the medium.

Vision Art Platform (Istanbul, TR)
Berna Dolmacı (Turkey, 1994) and Eren Su Kibele Yarman (Turkey, 1989) treat composition as a form of thinking. Dolmacı gathers fragments—leaves, waste, traces—until landscape becomes an archive of attention. Yarman, by contrast, compresses: symbols, diagrams, visual scores that read like instructions for perception. One extends outward, the other encodes, and somewhere between them the image stops being a window and becomes a system.

Heliconia Projects (Santo Domingo, DR)
Water runs through Mario Dávalos’ (Dominican Republic, 1978) work not as motif but as method. Landscape dissolves into relation, into memory, into something you cannot quite fix. Adelisa Selimbašić (Italy/Bosnia, 1996) counters with bodies that refuse to clarify themselves: faces hidden, gestures suspended, intimacy displaced into shadow. The figure becomes a threshold.

Galeria Salón Comunal (Bogota, CO)
Bernardo Montoya (Colombia, 1979) fabricates geology with conviction—paint becomes mineral, clay becomes eruption. The passage of time is shaped, twisted, accelerated. Carmen Elvira Brigard (Colombia, 1982), meanwhile, treats drawing as invocation: language sliding into gesture, spirituality stripped of doctrine and returned to the body as vibration, as voice without resolution.

helena rodrigues galeria (Porto, PT)
The body keeps reappearing, but not intact. Sofia Vermelho (Portugal, 2001) paints it as a site of intensity—carnal, symbolic, unresolved—while Ânia Pais (Portugal, 1998) displaces it into the domestic, into spaces that register without speaking. What emerges is a body distributed across surface and space, felt as atmosphere.

Galería NÉBOA (Lugo, ES)
Surface becomes the next terrain of negotiation. Andrea Davila Rubio (Spain, 1995) approaches the body as something continuously maintained—armoured, disciplined, cared for. Her sculptural forms, resembling skins or fragments of defence, suggest a body shaped as much by care as by control. Alongside, Andrés Rivas Rodís (Spain, 2000) treats the pictorial field as something living: layered, porous, accumulating traces like a palimpsest. His works absorb dust and context alike, insisting that images are never fixed but always in the process of becoming.

DiGallery (Seville, ES)
By this point, the gaze itself starts to shift. Emma Marting (Spain, 1999) traces how vision inscribes the body—soft, mutable forms pressed into rigid frameworks, as if visibility were always negotiated under pressure. Representation gives way to tension: who looks, who is shaped, who recedes. Pepe Domínguez (Spain, 1996) redirects that tension inward. Painting becomes less image than operation—surface, syntax, decision. The work no longer narrates but tests its own conditions, holding perception and thought in a provisional balance.

Vangar (Valencia, ES)
Sarah Viguer Cebriá (France, 1986) turns fibre into something subterranean, gestational—threads behaving like root systems beneath visibility. Elena Núñez Mallén (Spain, 1998) treats painting as a chain reaction—images triggering other images, accumulating into something that feels accidental yet inevitable.

Chilli (London, GB)
Ruth Speer (Great Britain, 1996) builds small mythologies out of wood and memory, where furniture, forests, and bodies coexist in a slow, handcrafted time. Tada Keisuke (Japan, 1986) fractures painting further, dragging it into virtual space—objects that might be images, images that behave like objects. All are caught between presence and simulation.

Salón Silicón (Mexico City, MX)
Elsewhere, the image is both community and second skin. Ileana Moreno (Mexico, 1989) approaches clothing as a mutable surface that reshapes the body, projecting it into futures marked by plastic, industry, and desire. Sandra Blow (Mexico, 1990) documents queer nightlife from within, collapsing the distance between subject and photographer; intimacy is not just observed but shared, staged and lived at once.

TATJANA PIETERS (Ghent, BE)

Ria Bosman (Belgium, 1956) builds from strips of hand-painted natural fibre—colour laid against colour, geometry held in tension, until the whole surface seems to breathe. Alongside, Elizabeth Ibarra’s (Mexico, 1986) figures drift—alien, solitary, strangely tender, as if identity were something slightly out of focus with itself.

MOOS fine art (Zurich, CH)
Gradually, centrality is lost. Juan Zamora (Spain, 1982) foregrounds non-human systems—plants, air, environments—as active agents, proposing a scenario where intelligence circulates beyond the visible. Estefanía Martín Sáenz (Spain, 1982) folds repetition into fiction. Patterns unravel into scenes where ritual and transformation collide; images that proliferate quietly, unsettling the boundary between the decorative and the real.

dialogue (Lisbon, PT)
Even collage and drawing refuse resolution. Sara Graça (Portugal, 1993) works at the edges of recognition, where the familiar demands a new syntax, images hiccupping before they cohere. Gonçalo Pena (Portugal, 1967), with sharp, absurd drawings and paintings, cuts through it all with scorn that feels like a structural glitch in meaning itself.

Across the section, nothing stays in place. The body becomes landscape, landscape becomes archive, archive becomes code. Materials remember (unfaithfully); images appear (briefly). What holds it all together is a condition: everything is in translation, between mediums, temporalities. And in that constant dynamism, the exhibition is not asking to be resolved. It asks to be navigated, like an orbit of overlapping worlds, each one leaking into the next.

Archipelago of Art Histories

The artists gathered here share a commitment to working through and with inherited forms as methods for interrogating how bodies and materials carry memory and knowledge, across multiple artistic languages that together offer a more complex picture of our present world than a single lineage of art ever could. These presentations make visible historical flows of different intensity, and ask what it means to work in a formal language, and what political and spiritual work is performed by the continuation of that art historical inheritance in the present.

To speak of an archipelago is to embrace a geography of distinct, sovereign formations, each with its own internal logic and history of transformations, yet organised in inescapable connections with each other. It reaffirms that art history is plural and that its many streams carry equal weight and depth. The six artists in this section have developed practices rooted in specific traditions and communities, and each of them operates within a system of entanglements, between the different strands of art history, between the sacred and the political, as well as between inherited technique and the fundamental role of personal agency and artistic imagination.

Josep Grau-Garriga (1929-2011) expanded the field and potential of tapestry throughout the many decades of his practice. Trained as a painter and muralist, he came to textiles through the revivals of Catalan lineages of craft and art, eventually developing a practice that incorporated this legacy and moved textiles into the three-dimensional space. His environaments, a term he adapted into Catalan from the English "environment," turned the making of large-scale textile installations into social events, seminars and acts of shared authorship. The choice of working in fiber, jute, and rope, materials carrying the hands and imprints of rural life and labour, should also be seen as a form of cultural resistance and political affirmation during the Franco years of an official, elitist, and monolithic idea of culture.

Belonging to the same generation, Irene Chou (1924-2011) was one of the most original artists of her time that worked within the vast tradition of Chinese and East Asian ink painting. Born in Shanghai and arriving in Hong Kong in 1949 amid the upheavals of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, she encountered a city in the process of inventing its own cultural identity, while being a key preserver of traditional Chinese artistic lineages, threatened by the cultural revolution on the mainland. She became a central figure in the New Ink Painting Movement, developing a practice that contributed to ink's journey through the questions of art in the twentieth century and its own participation in the waves of abstraction. Chou’s investigations were interior as much as social, extended explorations of what the brush stroke could become when driven by something closer to the body's own energy than to codified technique. Working with the "one-stroke" method, her forms evoke cellular biology, cosmic systems, sexual allusions, and the unconscious in equal measure.

Tsherin Sherpa (b. 1968) was trained from childhood in thangka painting by his father in Kathmandu, inheriting a tradition bound by strict systems of iconographic codes and devotional purpose, and encapsulating centuries of Tibetan Buddhist cosmology. Thangka painting genealogy sits in a multibranching tree of art-historical lineages that connects with several of Asia's major painterly traditions, mirroring thus Tibet's geographical and historical position at the continent's core. As the artist is part of the numerous Tibetan diaspora, practising thangka also carries the urgent historical and political responsibility of keeping alive one of the most recognisable expressions of a culture under systematic threat. Sherpa's contemporary practice carries this responsibility forward and employs it for the discussion of current issues. Working within the tradition’s visual vocabulary, his canonic and symbolic figures participate in conversations on the pressures of the present, including migration, loss, and the conflicts between the sacred tradition (particularly given its role in preserving connections with pre-occupation Tibet) and the secular contemporary worlds.

In the work of Citra Sasmita (b. 1990), inheritance is both a source of power and a site of struggle. Working from Bali, she has developed a practice rooted in the Kamasan painting tradition. This form dates to the fifteenth century and was for most of its history exclusively practised by men to narrate Hindu epics. Sasmita reclaims the technique and its materials, painting on handmade canvases and on cowhide, rewriting the narratives that the tradition has carried, filling them with female figures who act with agency and cosmological and sexual force. Bali's artistic heritage was long distorted by colonial exoticisation. During the Dutch colonial administration, Bali was constructed as a fundamental other, while the diaspora of Western artists during the time further contributed to the imagination of the island as a timeless paradise, perfect for escapist art and tourist desires. The complexity of local culture, as well as its conflicts (that saw, for example, up to 7% of its population killed in the mass violence in a few months at the end of 1965 and the beginning of 1966), led to a fiction that continues to serve tourism and the digital nomad economy. In Sasmita's paintings however, Kamasan painting is a living, contested and politically active practice, one that belongs to women as much as to men, and to the present as much as to the past.

Gabriel Chaile (b. 1985) works in adobe, the sun-dried brick of pre-Columbian and vernacular architecture, to create monumental anthropomorphic sculptures that trace the genealogies of form. Growing up in Tucumán in northwest Argentina, with Spanish, Afro-Arab, and Indigenous Candelaria ancestry, he encountered the ceramic objects of pre-Columbian cultures in the local institutions of his region. These vessels, ovens, and ritual objects became his references, forms that survived the colonial catastrophe and continue to carry meaning in the bodies and faces of people living today. For the presentation here, Chaile turns to two other dimensions of his expansive practice: his drawings and his collection of vernacular objects and arte popular, much of it gathered in Portugal, where he has lived for several years. These works reveal the archaeological instinct at the heart of his method. Moving through Portuguese flea markets, local craft traditions and popular devotional culture, Chaile finds forms that rhyme with those of Indigenous northwest Argentina, tracing genealogies of shape and use across cultures that colonial history placed on opposite sides of a power relation. In gathering and presenting these objects alongside his own drawings, he performs a reversal of the colonial gaze. Chaile's adopted country, Portugal, with its colonial past, becoms itself a territory of vernacular richness, its popular culture read through eyes formed by a different inheritance.

Nádia Taquary (b. 1967) works from Salvador, Bahia, a city whose Afro-Brazilian culture carries within it centuries of spiritual resilience and imagination. Her sculptures and installations take as their starting point the balangandãs, the decorative amulets worn by enslaved Black women in colonial Bahia, objects that carried, within their ornamentation, an entire system of spiritual protection, collective solidarity, and resistance. Working outward from this research into the history of Afro-Brazilian jewellery, Taquary creates works in bronze, gold, shells, and beads that expand these intimate objects into monumental form, invoking the orishas of the Yoruba tradition and the ancestral female power that pre-colonial African cosmology understood as foundational to the world. Her practice is a sustained act of historical recovery and spiritual affirmation, insisting on the completeness and rigour of the knowledge systems that Afro-Brazilian sacred traditions carry.

What connects these six practices across their differences of place, lineage, as well as generation is a shared condition and a shared method. Each of these artists has inherited a form that was marginalised in some way, suppressed or instrumentalised by colonial power in one of its many guises, whether the Francoist dismissal of craft, the Eurocentric canon's indifference to Chinese ink tradition, the continuous atrophy of Tibetan cultural heritage, the colonial and touristic regulation of Balinese art, the erasure of pre-Columbian material culture, or the silencing of Afro-Brazilian sacred traditions. And each of them has found in that marginalised inheritance a resource to think with and a set of tools for understanding the present and for imagining what their art histories with their genealogies of form, still have to say.

The archipelago affirms its islands. It honours their distinct profiles, their different depths, their particular histories of storm and settlement. What it proposes is that we learn to navigate between them.