Contemporânea

René Tavares's (1983, São Tomé and Príncipe) body of work occupies a space where fiction, orality, and memory intersect, not merely as narrative devices but as critical tools for examining, with irony and humour, the ways in which History is written, transmitted, and legitimised. At the centre of his practice lies not only what we remember but also the forms through which we learn to recognise and assimilate something as History, culture, or heritage.

The title of the exhibition—Luso-Portuguese—immediately introduces a semantic detour. The prefix “luso” is generally associated with terms indicating displacement or overlapping origins, whether more abstract, such as “descendant,” or more concrete, such as “Angolan,” “Brazilian,” or “Mozambican.” Within this overlay, a hierarchy is also inscribed: “luso” occupies the first position, while the “other” always comes second. The combination of these elements indicates an identity that is neither entirely “Luso” nor wholly “other,” but something in transit between worlds. In "Luso-Portuguese," however, prefix and root coincide in the same origin: “luso” and “Portuguese” point to the same place. The redundancy, apparent at first glance, also reveals a conceptual tension, a linguistic play that compels reflection on categories, borders, and hierarchies of identity. As the curators (Kunsthalle Lissabon) ask in the exhibition sheet: “Who can be called Luso? Who can bear this prefix? And what does this unequal distribution of names, categories, and accents reveal?”1

It is through this seemingly simple, inquisitive gesture that René Tavares’s work takes shape. By destabilising inherited categories, conventions, and naturalised linguistic expressions, the artist proposes different ways of reading the past not as a closed narrative but as a contested field; and from there, he experiments with alternative modes of imagining what is yet to come.

Identity, diaspora, memory, and heritage, as well as language, have been recurring objects of enquiry in Tavares’s work, in an effort to understand the processes through which grand narratives and colonial legacies are (re)structured and (re)contextualised across intersecting histories, temporalities, and geographies. Consider, for example, Carruagem Lusa (2022), presented at the EDP Foundation’s New Artists Award: a wooden structure reminiscent of a bus or train, along which painted panels in various skin tones are suspended—or carried, as if bodies—with words such as “preto,” “mulato,” “negrão,” “de cor,” “pardo,” and “cabeludo.” Within a postcolonial theoretical framework, this approach resonates with Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of hybridity in The Location of Culture, whereby cultural identities emerge in interstitial spaces, challenging fixed, monolithic identities.2 In this light, seemingly stable categories such as “luso” or “Portuguese” appear as constructs and products of power relations and historical differences.

At Kunsthalle Lissabon, Luso-Portuguese consists exclusively of new works that extend these objects of enquiry. In "Pessoa" por trás do véu (2025), 24 faces—16 of which are overlain with a translucent veil bearing the Portuguese Coat of Arms—confront us, as if questioning. More than a simple emblem, the coat of arms prompts reflection on who has the right to claim it and what it truly means to bear it, revealing not only mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion but also the deep marks of inheritance, power, and recognition—or lack thereof—embedded in the symbol. Facing "Pessoa" por trás do véu, one cannot help but recall an earlier work by Tavares, Piá mú / olha para mim (2022): a set of wooden boards traditionally used for crushing chillies in São Tomé and Príncipe, repurposed to bear portraits of members of the Angolar community from the island’s south (a fishing community that resisted colonialism). These supports are mounted on mirror frames reminiscent of those associated with Western upper-middle-class contexts, highlighting both the impossibility of fixing the work within a single geographical frame and the regimes of belonging and exclusion it engages.

_{René Tavares, “Pessoa” por detrás do véu, 2025. Natural pigment, acrylic, stencil, charcoal on canvas. Photo: Bruno Lopes. Courtesy Kunsthalle Lissabon.}

The coat of arms reappears in The next future (2025), on the back of a wooden chair with a green velvet seat—a reference to the “Chair of Lions” in the official office of the President of Portugal. Like "Pessoa" por trás do véu, it evokes notions and sentiments of power and exclusion. While The next future presents an empty space to be filled (whether imagined or actual), across the room, in the painting My place of reflection (2025), the same chair is occupied by a woman sitting in a posture of demonstrative authority and confidence. This dialogue unfolds as an interplay between power and representation: notably, the position of women, particularly racialised women, remains far more associated with silence, invisibility, and subservience than with the office of the highest state representative. Ultimately, by proposing for this space a body that has been traditionally denied positions of authority, Tavares invites us to imagine a future in which marginalised subjects assert themselves as agents and protagonists, articulating narratives grounded in their own experiences and desires.

In Uma família bem portuguesa (2025), a family poses in a home furnished with iconic objects of the Portuguese imaginary, such as Vista Alegre blue-and-white porcelain. Such objects operate as symbols of prestige and social belonging: they are not accessible to all, across all socioeconomic strata, but reserved for the more privileged, and desired by many of those who cannot afford them. Here too, one perceives how collections, material forms, and images become implicated in symbolic struggles over legitimacy and distinction.

Alongside the family portrait, the triptych O espelho da minha história (2025) shows cotton branches in blue-and-white porcelain vases. While at first glance these images might resemble still lifes, a closer reading reveals evocations of colonial trade and the violence of enslaved labour underpinning the cotton economy. The juxtaposition of delicate, decorative domestic elements with colonial histories of unimaginable violence demonstrates how official narratives—presented in books as historical accounts of nationhood, typically glorified and romanticised—tend to obscure and soften legacies of violence, injustice, and extraction.

Ultimately, René Tavares’s work invites us to reconsider how what we recognise and assimilate as History, memory, and identity are themselves products of construction and contestation. Through symbols, objects, and images, he challenges hegemonic narratives and renders visible relations of power and exclusion that often remain hidden, ignored, or silenced. In articulating questions of identity and memory, his body of work visually translates both Pierre Nora’s notion of "sites of memory"3 (symbolic structures in which collective memory crystallises and is negotiated) and Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of hybridity4 (which challenges static identities and foregrounds the complexity of cultures in contact). Extending beyond a critique of the past, Tavares’s practice proposes a reconfiguration of the gaze and of art as a site of critical memory. In doing so, Luso-Portuguese not only reveals much of what has been systematically overlooked or deliberately erased, but also gestures towards a potential future in which marginalised memory-sites, narratives, and bodies occupy the roles and spaces of their own choosing.

_{René Tavares, Luso-portugueses, 2025. Exhibition views at Kunsthalle Lissabon. Photos: Bruno Lopes. Courtesy Kunsthalle Lissabon.}

René Tavares

Kunsthalle Lissabon