Matt Black and Rat presents recent work by artist Emily Wardill (1977, UK), who has lived and worked in Lisbon since 2014.

Produced in collaboration with the Bergen Kunsthall, the exhibition presents two new films, a new series of relief sculptures and an original set of photograms. In these works, the artist explores the limits of communication and language, destabilising the images and objects and creating narratives in which reality, fantasy, the supernatural, and at times terror (through references to the cinematic genre of horror films) converge.

The film I gave my love a cherry that had no stone (2016), filmed in the Foyer of the Grand Auditorium at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, explores the performative relationship between body and space and their mutual contamination, through both the construction of the film and the conditions in which it is presented, embodied in an installation which destabilises the position of the viewer. The film No Trace of Accelerator, co-produced specifically for the exhibitions in Bergen and Lisbon, is based on a mysterious event which occurred in the 1990s in the small, isolated French village of Moirans-en-Montagne, where a series of apparently spontaneous fires which went unexplained for a long time provoked a collective reaction and construction shrouded in fear and superstition, later becoming an anthropological case study. Here, fire is a transformative action and power, a central catalysing element both in the film No Trace of Accelerator and in the complete set of works brought together in the exhibition Matt Black and Rat.

Curator: Rita Fabiana

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