João Maria Gusmão e Pedro Paiva

Portuguese artists João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva use film, sculpture, and installation explore the paranormal, the inexplicable, and the unconscious. For example, the kaleidoscopic world created by the 27 16mm films in their immersive installation Papagaio (2015) takes viewers on an imaginative journey into science, philosophy, and religion. Shot with a high-speed camera but projected in slow motion, the films reveal ordinarily imperceptible detail with ghostly effect. Starting from journeys, stories, anecdotes or cinematic allegories and with few contextual cues to enable the enigmatic scenarios to be located in a specific time or place, the veracity of each film is ambiguous. The two accompanying camera obscura installations directly investigate and display the behaviour of vision and light, and the aperture motif which is reiterated in other works, connects representations of the eye to the camera. With an emphasis on materiality and aesthetic immediacy, Gusmão +Paiva’s work draws attention to the paradoxes in the appearance of reality and probes at the nature of truth, perception, and the objectivity of vision.