Ângela Ferreira

«Ângela Ferreira’s first solo show in London also marks the launch of Marlborough Contemporary, located above Marlborough Fine Art’s historic gallery.

Ferreira’s work incorporates diverse materials and histories. Sculptural forms often present other research media, such as film or photography. The work references modernist and architectural precedents, their relationships to post-colonial narratives and displaced utopias.

Stone Free links two holes, two spaces, two locations. The Cullinan Diamond Mine, source of one of the largest diamonds ever unearthed, acts as the first reference point for the show. Loaded with symbolic value, mines in South Africa have always appeared as powerful images of the political and economic structures that they sustained. The Chislehurst Caves in South East London are a warren of mines and tunnels that became a site of counter-culture in the Sixties. Jimi Hendrix, who performed there, is a key figure for the exhibition, bridging not only musical cultures, but also an African American identity via an adopted home in London, just yards from the gallery. One of his songs lends the show its title.

How to represent a hole in material terms? For Ferreira these excavations might be interpreted as negative monuments attesting to the paradoxical history of human desires, presented as a social and critical space.

Born in Mozambique, with Portuguese and South African heritage, Ferreira lives and works in Lisbon. Her retrospective, No Place At All, took place at the Chiado Museum in Lisbon in 2003. In 2007 she represented Portugal in the Venice Biennale with Maison Tropicale, now housed in the Museion, Bolzano. In 2008 she was selected for the São Paulo Biennial. Current commissions include projects at the Walther Collection, Ulm and at the Haus der Kunst, Berlin. Her work is represented in many international collections, from the FRAC Bretagne in France to the National Gallery of South Africa.»