André Guedes graduated in Architecture from the Technical University of Lisbon (1996). He was artist-in-residence at the Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto (Biella, 2003), Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2005-2006), Nosadella-due (Bologna, 2007) and at Gasworks (London, 2011), on a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation scholarship. Winner of the União Latina Visual Arts Prize (2007), André Guedes is one of the young visual artists in Portugal whose oeuvre has been more consistent and most articulated at an international level. With a work that, in the ranks of post-conceptual art, advances a social and political critique, Guedes uses ideas (upon researching historical and literary subjects) and information (by including in his works means of communication, newspapers and documentation) as a medium, leading to various installations, performances, stage sets and urban interventions.
The political mobilization of reclaiming and contesting spaces, whilst redefining the idea of artistic object, is strongly indebted to theatre, involving the spectator as an agent who makes sense of the leads, who associates elements and participates in the creative processes that is constitutive of the work itself. As protagonist, the body is framed in an intimate relationship on the stage of bureaucratic spaces or familiar spaces which he intentionally rebuilds. These are always places of social interaction, constructed by dislocating prefabricated and found objects, thereby exploiting tropes of post-industrial society, as the non-place (occurring in semi-public stages, such as lifts, forms of transportation or waiting rooms) and the archive (removing inventories and archive cabinets from actual administrative contexts like offices and stores, invoking the place of memory and routine), as in AIROTIV (2009). Taking as central axis the mediation between the works and the public, in keeping with the living dimension of theatre, André Guedes articulates art as a tool of transformation and social commentary, featuring strategies of re-contextualization of space, dislocation and re-appropriation of materials, de-stabilizing the spectator’s position, and a tension established between texts and contexts, conceived for each of his works, in experimental platforms which have found their way into successive shows and projects, in Portugal, Spain, Italy, France and the United Kingdom.
André Guedes currently lives and works in Lisbon.
