Rui Mourão gästade Skövde under 8 veckor i april-maj 2018. Han arbetar inom fältet socialt engagerad konst främst video och fotografi men även med performance. Mourãos praktik ligger i mötet mellan etnografi och konst, ett fält där han där han även är doktorand vid NOVA i Lissabon.
Rui Mourão om sin praktik
"I work with video, photography and installations.
In my artistic practice, I isolate everyday, real situations and I give them new meanings. The processes of reflection, representation and construction beyond the actual situation begin with the record and the appropriation by me of the reality close at hand. Such records become a metaphor for personal or collective processes of search for identity, power, knowledge and meaning in given contemporary contexts (at levels social, economic, political, cultural, historical, etc).
While recording situations of resistance, withdrawal or adaptation, I am particularly interested in showing the connections and the tensions such that arise between the individual and the collective, the exception and the system, the transient and the permanent, the linear and the non-linear, the private and the public, looking and being looked at, the self and the Other. In dealing with these questions, my practice towards reality is mostly contemplative and I give much care to framing. Frequently, my video work takes a performance quality based on minimal, ordinary, non-fictional action. The pre-existing scene acts as a stimulus for the action. The editing of the images introduces a choreographic dimension to the action and its movements.
I channel my personal experience into my practice. Especially, I draw on situations from my temporary jobs - as a teacher, in call centers, in archives, in theatres, museums, etc. By appropriating and subverting such experiences (that are originally related to utility, functionality and necessity) and producing artistic work out of it, I endeavour to conquer a space of liberty. All is done at the workplace and in the working hours. The images produced in this way introduce the viewer to a form of pragmatism that is at the same time its reflection and a reflection on it. In the end, it is as though the different experiences, once isolated and framed, were seen in a mirror-image, observed from a significant distance where, in the end, everything will shift from its original context. The original situations are not that natural anymore and the way is open to reinterpret it all."