Occupying both galleries of the Gulbenkian Foundation’s Headquarters building, the exhibition brings together artworks, documents, texts, immersive rooms, original films, and specially commissioned videos. Its aim is to offer Portuguese and Brazilian audiences an opportunity for mutual rediscovery in a shared space of reflection that acknowledges both historical ties and the challenges and possibilities of the present.

Complex Brazil begins with the idea that what we know today as Brazil – multiple in its many Brasis – is the outcome of a complex historical process marked by Portuguese colonisation, which connected territories and cultures across Europe, Africa, and the Americas. In that context, African populations were brought to the American continent, and vast lands inhabited by Indigenous peoples were drawn into a new colonial order.