João Penalva is a Portuguese artist who has been living in the UK since studying at Chelsea School of Art in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Making art is his second career – in his first he was a dancer, working with Pina Bausch and Gerhard Bohner. His work betrays this history - it is primarily about storytelling through the partnership of images and elaborate often beguiling narratives. Penalva is known for making large-scale installations in various media, as well as more intimate works with video and slide projections, sound, drawing, painting and found materials. Through these media he addresses narrative modes and the relationships between images, text, language and sound. His storytelling is often fractured, presenting juxtaposed narrative elements, allowing the viewer a latitude of freedom in their interpretation.
"Conflict, Time, Photography" presents the many facets of the artistic portrayal of armed conflicts using the medium of photography. Artists such as Don McCullin, Pierre-Antony-Thouret, Simon Norfolk, Stephen Shore, Michael Schmidt and Taryn Simon have depicted acts of war and their legacy, in photographs taken in the mo-ment of the action, as well as days, months, years, and even decades after the event. This major group exhibition has no intention of serving as a ‘history of war photography’, however. It instead explores the various possibilities and strategies that artists and photographers have adopted to try to come to terms with violent conflict, in the hope of overcoming it. On show are some 200 works ranging from a period of just over 150 years in the history of photography, from 1855 to 201...
Lunds konsthall's programme for 2010 starts with a solo exhibition by the celebrated Portuguese artist João Penalva. The focus is on works produced in the last five years, but one important earlier piece, the slide and sound installation Character and Player, 1998, has been included as a bass note for the whole exhibition.
The display created for the 1950s architecture of Lunds konsthall includes, among other works, the slide and video installation Pavlina and the automated shadow theatre Petit Verre, both 2007, and the triple video projection Hermitage Pier, 2004. There is also a specially commissioned installation of ten loose-sheet picture books, individually titled and displayed on reading tables, as well as a series of seven large framed digital prints with accompanying short texts, also individually tit...