Contemporânea

Sara Graça and the Performance of Materials

Sara Graça’s enigmatic work resists clear definition without thereby becoming pretentious. Wandering through the rooms of her show Boa Good Sorte Luck at Culturgest Lisboa, curated by Bruno Marchand, watching entre o meio-dia e as três [between noon and three o’clock] at Solar — Cinematic Art Gallery, and looking through documentation from her shows of the last decade, I find myself instead drawn to the image of clowning. Not so much because her works are funny (although sometimes they are, as in the case of the Ratazanas sculptures from 2020),1 but because of how they interact with their viewer in a tentative push-and-pull friction between the artist, the materials and the audience. Let me explain with the help of some words from a clown friend, who once told me:

“In clown, you try something out, something that is prepared, and then you see how people react. When you find what makes them laugh, you pull on that thread, trying to see if you can increase that emotion. If your audience isn’t reacting, you can’t make a show. It’s all about this friction, this push-and-pull between the artist and the audience.”2

In Sara’s work I find this very clown-like performance of materials pushing and pulling the pieces, constrained by their materiality and the space where they are shown or where they are to be kept, and pulled by the artist’s life circumstances and encountered ideas. Her works are made as if ideas were found objects with a presumption that the pieces would after a show once again become found objects, both puzzled together by the moment of the show and the particularities of the space. As viewers, we enter this push-and-pull almost unconsciously, uncertain of where we can fit in among the dynamic pieces. An example is the central piece in Boa Good Sorte Luck, Leave Soon (10’ video loop, 2025). Filmed on the South Bank in London with a rotating camera, the piece shows a person slow-motion jumping sideways along the promenade. The rotation is fluid, so that the person and the horizontal lines of the bridge and the river rotate like a high-speed clock, creating an extremely nauseating effect so strong that the piece is almost impossible to watch for longer than a dozen seconds.

The rest of the show stretches out across two corridors, with three rooms on each side of the one where Leave Soon is displayed, filled with references to being swallowed and spat out, as if the whole exhibition were a digestive system. I unconsciously connect it to being swallowed by “the system,” placed in my mind by the subtle clues and references to cheap, crammed housing, as we struggle to keep ourselves afloat, scattered across the show. At the same time, the show keeps itself light with the The Little Prince reference in the graphite drawings, such as “... is it like a fake clock?” (2025), in which two skeletons sit inside a snake and point at a dripping peace symbol (“WTF is on that wall? Is it a fake clock?” reads a speech bubble), making me want to giggle.

Talking with Sara, I find her grappling for words to define her practice. “I don’t work in a very linear way: there are material processes and metaphorical processes happening, and I try to play with everything at the same time.”3 For Boa Good Sorte Luck, the initial response was to the physical layout of the space: “the floors are not leveled in these six rooms that are on the sides of the audiovisual space. The first thing I wanted to do was to eliminate the steps between the rooms with a sculpture that exists in more than one room at the same time,” she explains to me.4This led to recycling boards from walls that were being taken down for Alexandra Bircken’s simultaneous exhibition at Culturgest and from Expoload, an outsourced company assembling the show, who which had boards in chipboard, laminate, MDF and superpan for making platforms in storage. Sara worked with Expoload to build ramps between the rooms, randomly and not so neatly, while ensuring that it was safe—something that could be a challenge for a team used to methodical, polished construction for exhibition spaces. With the team’s compositional understanding in response to Sara’s prompt, the various boards, sometimes numbered, created a weird continuum across the rooms. This way of working with materials ties into one of Sara’s main concerns: to ensure that she is not making work in a void, but in spaces with their own material history, with people who have their own material understanding, and with the social dynamics both entail.

Sara’s initial intervention in the rooms led her to think of flow, obstruction, movement, and structure. Hanging a found shelf on a wall led it to almost obstruct the entrance to one of the rooms; “I was calling it an irritation in the passage. This made me think of swallowing something that is a bit difficult to swallow,” she explains. So, what if this idea of swallowing is a way of thinking about the space itself? What if entering a space means you need to trust the space to swallow you? Sharing her exhibition creation process, Sara reveals how her methodology is a slow unravelling of threads of ideas as they are pulled by the circumstances. Suddenly, the rest of the show seems to naturally grow the way a garden grows once you start planting around one plant. As we finish talking about the Culturgest show, she concludes: “I was thinking of these ideas of flow and obstruction in the space and in the body, and then connecting both, seeing these up-and-down movements as an analogy of a life that is full of twists and turns.”5

There is a similar approach to materiality in a piece from 2020, namely the Ratazanas sculptures made for her solo show Ratazanas e Calendários [Rats and Calendars] at Sismógrafo, Porto. At the time living in a house share with eleven people, Sara found herself fascinated by everyone’s reactions to a family of rats that had also moved into the space. Despite the stark differences in their personalities, the housemates’ screaming responses to encountering rats were the same. Responding to the material limitations of living in London without much storage space and making a show in Porto, Sara decided to make foldable, unsellable pieces out of A0 sheets of mount boards, black on one side and white on the other. Folding, cutting and fitting them into one another, she made cut-out rats that were four metres long and around a metre high when mounted, and that fitted in a drawing folder when folded. She spread bleach on the black side and then covered it with a floor wax she had in her studio, corroding the colour to a brownish-white, and screenprinted blue patterns with some green and white and made ballpoint pen drawings on the white side—both a contrast to the red floor of the exhibition space. The pieces thus became performative sculptures, the audience’s movement acting as the performance switch: when you enter the room, the pieces are black and brown, and when you turn around to leave, they are blue and white.6

_{Sara Graça, Boa Sorte [Good Luck]. Exhibition views at Culturgest, Lisbon, 2025. Photos: António Jorge Silva and Elisa Azevedo. Courtesy Culturgest.}

This impromptu, playful approach that takes its starting point in the space itself is also seen in Sara’s first solo show in Lisbon, B Blossoms (2022), at Mala. She tells me that here the starting point was the particularity of the gallery being almost more window than space, giving it the feeling of being some kind of shop. “From the start I wanted to do something related to the idea of a shop or a fake shop,” Sara explains. “At the same time I was also thinking about insomnia,” she adds suddenly.7 What followed in our conversation reveals quite a bit of Sara’s process: due to a heartbreak in her personal life, she was also thinking about stages of mistrust, of not really knowing what to believe. This became connected to metal surfaces (“I don’t know so much about metal, so I am always wondering what metal this or that shiny surface is”8). Bringing together these seemingly diverse threads of shopfronts, falsity, mistrust, insomnia and metal surfaces almost as you would when creating a found-object-based show, Sara begins to untangle the yarn and spin it into a thread. She formulates it as many different things that happen at the same time: “practical thoughts, formal thoughts and emotional, maybe poetic, thoughts—and then it is about problem-solving and navigating all of this in a very material reality.”9

For B Blossoms, the material-reality-cum-red-thread became a fake florist’s shop, decorated with blinds cut out from green vinyl stuck on the glass, buckets, boards, old sculptures performing as found material, dry flowers, and an empty shop sign. The blinds are clearly not functioning, as if the shop were either closed or had never been open; nor does the shop sign state the name of the shop. Instead, the plywood sign is painted with a mix of cheap floor wax product and graphite powder, giving it a metallic look, and splashed with white ink as if a bird had shat on it. In this non-functioning or dysfunctioning shop are sculptures in air-dry clay covered with the same floor product and graphite powder, polished to a shine, making them look like—or perform as—lead.10 Things are clearly not what they seem, something that is even more keenly felt during sleepless nights, and this is exactly what the sculptures show, forming reliefs that feature people lying in beds with delirious thoughts coming out of their head. An imagery of delirium created through deluding performance: what a treat!

Rather than committing to a discipline or creating a specific material language, Sara’s practice stands out in the unique approach she takes to space, materials and metaphysics. It is the interrelational that comes to the forefront, rather than the result. Particularly interesting here is the piece on display at Solar in Vila do Conde, entre o meio-dia e as três. A work-in-progress piece that the artist began during a residency at Solar, it consists of a video projected onto a screen with four enlarged photo transparencies on its back, retro-illuminated by the projection. The video shows three young pairs of friends (18–22 years old) who responded to posters the artist put up on the street, calling for participants for her piece. The mundane, anti-heroic work plays with the trope of “sitting at the beach and speaking about deep things, looking into the sea horizon.”11 They talk about their dreams for the future (which happen to be fairly normative—having a house, a partner, a job, a couple of kids—thereby inadvertently revealing basic social insecurities) and perform trust exercises, such as falling into each other’s arms and making shapes in the air with their hands.

The beach as social experiment also features in Clube-Estrada-Praia, Sara’s 2021 solo project at Pedro Barateiro’s art space Spirit Shop. The development of this show speaks to her way of interacting with circumstances to inspire her actions. I first read about the show in Alberta Romano’s intriguing piece on a studio visit to Sara’s studio (without the artist ever turning up, replaced with a beautiful welcoming by her studio assistant Iva Lorena—who, it turns out, was imaginary). In the piece, Alberta and Iva speak of the upcoming “show” as a schedule for people to sign up to go to the beach with Sara.12 My curiosity sparked, I of course asked Sara about the exhibition. “That summer, my mum gave me her [Citroën] Picasso,” she begins, explaining how much she wanted to include the Picasso in the work and go to the beach more often. Simple as that, it bore the idea of taking people to the beach. “The whole show was just me driving people to the beach and back. We would have conversations, go to the sea, play music.”13 At that time, cautious about who might turn up if this was randomly posted on the street, Sara and Pedro advertised it as an art show. Afterwards, some of the people who went became her friends.

In both social experiment-cum-artworks on and with the beach, we find Sara playing with prompts, seeing who will turn up and how they will turn up. This same practice reappears in her interaction with the building team at Culturgest: a kind of playful, trusting experimentation where the works are co-created almost as anti-art pieces. In fact, seeing her work keeps reminding me of a contemporary take on the anti-art philosophy of the Fluxus group, who also made playful pieces pushing the limits of materials and social dynamics. Interweaving the material with the personal, and trusting the flow of experimentation, Sara’s work is refreshing, surprising, and unexpectedly light, despite the keen awareness of the darkness it exists in.