Frontiere
Becoming Opaque
Paula Albuquerque / Netherlands / 2025 / 46′
Becoming Opaque questions the common visual language used in the former Dutch and Portuguese colonies (but also in other regions where indigenous peoples were enslaved) to create racial and gender stereotypes. Paula Albuquerque traces a path from the earliest phrenological methods to their current incarnation in the surveillance datasets used to train artificial intelligence. Bringing together propaganda films, ethnographic recordings and amateur footage, her installation defends the right of indigenous peoples to opacity in images captured by settlers, whether political officials or European globetrotters.
INTRASTEVERE CINEMA – Room 1, May 31, 11 a.m.
Paula Albuquerque
Albuquerque is a Portuguese artist and scholar based in Amsterdam who has had solo exhibitions at Zone2Source (2024), Bradwolff Projects (2023, 2018, 2015), Looiersgracht 60 (2023) and Nieuw Dakota (2020) galleries; with films at the IDFA (2024); Ji’hlava IDFF (2024); DocAlliance (2024); DocLisboa (2023); Sheffield DOC|Fest (2020) and Rotterdam IFFR (2016) international festivals; and at the EYE International; Media in Transition at MIT; NECS; and Visible Evidence conferences. She has published the books Enter the Ghost-Haunted Media Ecologies (2020) and The Webcam as an Emerging Cinematic Medium (2018). She is currently a senior researcher at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, a research assistant at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and a member of the supervisory board of the contemporary art platform Framed Framed.