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An Ocean Between Us

Mónica de Miranda

2013 00:06:33 Portugal, AngolaColorStereo16:9HD video
Tags:
Love, Mental Landscape

Description

An Ocean Between Us expresses the desire for a relationship that is made up of transitions, successive time shifts, and coordinated changes without an essential unity. This project tells a story about a couple that roam inside a boat moored in a slip along the dock by the port of Lisbon, waiting for the ‘last call’ to departure to Luanda. In the video the audio track is composed of the sounds of boat engines and waves from the ocean that brought this couple together, and now take them apart. They walk close to each other, but are spiritually far apart. Even if they share the same physical space they never speak to each other; they live in a state of transit and wonder. The individual here is recognized as a conjunction of inner expressions that produce history, subjectivity and meaning. An Ocean Between Us is about the globalization paradoxes such as the impossibility of the meeting between cultures and the absurdities of living in diaspora. 

About Mónica de Miranda

Mónica de Miranda is a Portuguese/Angolan visual artist, filmmaker and researcher whose interdisciplinary and research-based practice critically looks at the convergence of politics, gender, memory, space and history. Her work encompasses drawing, installation, photography, film and sound, on the boundaries between documentary and fiction. Mónica investigates strategies of resistance, geographies of affection, storytelling and ecologies of care.

She is the founder and the artistic director of Hangar (2014), an art and research centre in Lisbon. Hangar’s programs provide spaces where artists, curators and researchers, mainly from the global south, can co-create and build social and creative networks to benefit their communities.

Her work has been presented at major international events such as: 1st Malta Biennale; 3th Lagos Biennale; 6th Lubumbashi Biennale; 12th Berlin Biennale; 12th Dakar Biennale; 5th International Biennial of Casablanca; Bamako Encounters – 13th African Biennale of Photography; 14th Venice Architecture Biennale; BIENALSUR 2021; Houston FotoFest 2022; 18th Fotografia Europea, Reggio Emilia. She represented the Portugal Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia 2024.

Solo and group exhibitions have taken place at: Sharjah Biennale, Sharjah, Wexner Art Center, Ohio; Photo Ireland, Dublin; Caixa Cultural, Rio de Janeiro; Bildmuseet, Umeå; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; Gulbenkian, Lisbon; MUCEM, Marseilles; AfricaMuseum, Tervuren; MAAT, Lisbon; MUAC, Mexico City; Barbican, London; Autograph, London; Frac des Pays de la Loire, Nantes; Uppsala Museum, Sweden; MNAC, Lisbon; Camões Cultural Institute, Luanda, among others.

Mónica de Miranda received the Soros Arts Fellowship (2024) and La Caixa Foundation Fellowship (2022). She won the Expanded Photography Prize in Torino (2024), and was nominated for the Louis Roederer Photography Prize for Sustainability (2024), EDP Foundation’ New Artists Award (2019) and Novo Banco Photo Prize (2016).

Mónica de Miranda is also a researcher with the Foundation for Science and Technology (2013-2024) in the Center for Comparative Studies at University of Lisbon where she coordinates the cluster Post-Archive: Politics of Place, Memory and Identity.