Between 5 April and 5 June 2021, Galeria Zé dos Bois presents ALL-U-NEED, an exhibition that brings together two exhibitions by Patrícia Almeida.
Through a research process to the archives of the photographer Patrícia Almeida with the purpose of gathering scattered photographs, little or never seen, the curators David Guéniot and Natxo Checa have selected two sets of pieces so distinct that they could only be presented autonomously.
On the one hand, there is a series of photographs representative of a Portuguese daily universe: a work commissioned by the Institute for Employment and Professional Training in 2008, with the aim of capturing the socio-professional context of five training centres. The result of this work – only presented in the context of the collective exhibition Testemunhos – Trajectos de Qualificação (IEFP in Porto) – ends up reflecting, already at the time, and ironically, a somewhat obsolete environment. Its revisiting, considering the speed of recent technological advances, makes this feeling of extemporaneity even more evident.
On the other hand, if the first exhibition shows us a concrete reality defined in time and space, the second one goes towards the oneiric: a set of photographs taken by Patrícia Almeida over twenty years is selected from a dream transcribed in one of her workbooks. With no pretension to build a representative sample of her work (it is not a question here of encouraging a retrospective or anthological look), the photographs are freely organized starting from this dream that, serving as a lemotif for the rediscovery of her archive, allows us to glimpse into the artist’s imaginary, bringing together distinct pieces – both by their dates of realization and by the themes, styles or techniques used – that reveal the experimental spirit of her work.
