Opening: February 14 at 6 p.m.
Patented until: February 28, 2026
Location: LAC – Creative Activities Laboratory
Price: Free admission
Partnership with GNRation (Braga), under the auspices of RPAC – Portuguese Contemporary Art Network
Synopsis
Homúnculo is an installation that integrates sculpture, painting, video projection, and sound, evoking the complexity and strangeness of the body’s materiality in the post-human context. Homunculus is an expression of non-normative bodies—such as border bodies and cyborg bodies—situated between the organic and the artificial, the visceral and the digital. The installation space is inhabited by a set of synthetic epidermis specimens molded in painted silicone, created from sampling, synthesis, and morphing of images of the artist’s skin. These textured surfaces, with tactile and visual effects, are arranged on the wall like relief paintings or molded and sewn to rehearse three-dimensional organic forms, like bodies without organs. Both, illuminated by the projection of moving images, invite the viewer to come closer, observe closely, touch, extend, and manipulate. The artistic expression resulting from the dialogue between these elements alludes, on the one hand, to the aesthetics of horror and, on the other, to exercises in speculation and extrapolation from the universe of science fiction. Homúnculo is an act of reconciliation with the symbiotic and technological body, an invitation to reflect on how emerging technologies challenge our ability to imagine other ways of conceiving the human body in a present marked by turmoil, war, and climate cataclysms.
Joana Pestana
Biography
Dora Vieira is a visual artist and musician, born in 1991 in Barcelos. She graduated in Multimedia — Visual Arts from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Porto, where she lived for seven years and began her artistic and musical career, continuing to actively produce in both areas to this day. In 2014, she joined the Porto-based collective and record label Favela Discos, working at the intersections between exploratory music, free improvisation, performance, concert, installation, audiovisual, and experimental art. At the same time, while living in the city, she produced and curated a large number of multidisciplinary events. In 2021, she co-founded the neo-surrealist collective Movimentos Bruxos, whose work was exhibited in the exhibition of the same name, in the same year, at the Palácio Vila Flor, in Guimarães. She has shared her artistic and musical work in solo and group exhibitions, residencies, events, and festivals, in self-managed and institutional spaces, both inside and outside the country. In 2022, she collaborated with the artistic department of a film production, an experience that allowed her to acquire knowledge about the creation of prosthetics for special effects. Her work communicates in symbolic language, meditating on existentialist questions and processes of self-knowledge. She is influenced by universes such as science fiction, body horror, and the semiotics of the sacred, starting from an ecumenical perspective. Musically, she is a member of the experimental duo Bezbog, the ensemble Milteto, a trumpet player in Amijas, and performs solo as Moira.
