DANIEL BARROCA
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The Sleepers
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Curated by Beniamino Foschini
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October 16 – December 5, 2009
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Daniel Barroca (born Lisbon 1976) spent one month on the island of Kea as a Qbox resident artist.
In 2008, Barroca purchased from a second hand shop in Berlin an 8mm film called “Kreta”, which is a propaganda film depicting the Nazi invasion of the island of Crete in 1941. In his solo exhibition the artist will present four videos that result from the process of cutting and dismantling the original ‘narrative’ structure of the film in his aim to find a different point of view over the old original footage.
Along with the video installation titled ...a hazy and confused landscape Barroca presents a series of drawings that articulate a relation between the images in “Kreta”, with Byzantine representations of the legend of the Marble or Sleeping Emperor. The drawing practice is part of the process of “thinking” how we perceive images. The Sleepers is a series of drawings that articulate a relation between the images in “Kreta”, with Byzantine representations of the legend of the Marble or Sleeping Emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos who disappeared in 1453 in the battle of the fall of Constantinople, and with representations of D. Sebastião the so called The Sleeping One, the King of Portugal who disappeared in 1578 in the battle of Alcácer Quibir.
Daniel Barroca was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1976. He finished his art studies in 2001 at the School of Art and Design of Caldas da Rainha and he was accepted for the year 2010 at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Nederlands In 2008 he was resident at the International Studio Program of the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien and in 2004 he was in residence at the Spanish Academy in Rome with the Unione Latine Prize for the Young Creation in Visual Arts 2003/04.
His work has been displayed in venues such as the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (Porto, Portugal, 2003), the Rencontres Internacionales Paris/Berlin (Paris, France, 2005, the Ex-is Festival of Experimental Video and Film of Seoul (South Korea, 2006), the Espace Videographe in Montreal and Time Based Media in Toronto (2006), Experiments in Cinema V 2.0 (Albuquerque, USA, 2007), the Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin, Germany, 2008), the National Centre for Contemporary Art (Moscow, Russia, 2009).
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The Qbox Residency Program was inaugurated in the summer of 2007 and is tailored to young as well as to mid-career artists and curators from abroad.
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