Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea

Rua Serpa Pinto, 4 | Rua Capelo, 13 1200-444 Lisboa

Inauguration → 20 . 11 . 2025 → 06:00 pm

21 . 11 . 2025 → 01 . 02 . 2026

tuesday - sunday → 10:00 am – 01:00 pm :: 02:00 pm – 06:00 pm

Last entry → 5:30 pm

Curated by

Elina Heikka

Our relationship with old family photos and photo albums is very emotional. When we browse through old photos, dear and precious memories come to mind, but sometimes also painful questions. Especially when family history contains difficult and silent issues, photographs evoke a variety of conflicting emotions. Photographs have a special power to energize our minds. They can linger in the mind as if demanding an answer.

The three artists in this exhibition have in common that an essential part of their projects are old family photos they have found. Photographs and archives have motivated the artists, and they are a substantive part of their work series. The artists in the exhibition are Aline Motta, Sofia Yala and Yassmin Forte, whose families’ pasts are burdened in many ways by Portuguese colonialism in Brazil, Angola and Mozambique.

When Brazilian Aline Motta heard that her grandmother’s unknown father had been a white teenage boy whose father her grandmother worked for, Motta set out to uncover her family history. As a reminder of the slave trade era, she metaphorically takes photographs of her relatives back to their roots in Portugal and Sierra Leone. Sofia Yala’s photo series symbolically visualizes the artist’s research process, which aimed to uncover the history of her own Anglesea family. Yassmin Forte’s photo series paints a picture of the challenging love story of a father who served in the Portuguese army and a Mozambican mother, marked by the legacy of colonial wars.

Typically, a well-documented family history and thick photo albums spanning several generations tell of a family’s socioeconomically privileged position, while a more modest background means a more open family history. What the three artists have in common is that their families’ pictorial heritage is fragmented, random, and often raises more questions than answers. Archives and research help to unravel the mysteries, but despite all efforts, uncertainty remains.