HANGAR ONLINE — TALK
🗓 January 23 | 17h (Lisbon time)
📍 Online | In Spanish
As part of the exhibition Currents of Restitution: Abolishing the Museum, HANGAR – Centro de Investigação Artística hosts an online conversation between artist Sandra Gamarra and writer Gabriela Wiener, moderated by curator Ana Salazar Herrera.
The dialogue will reflect on museums, colonial legacies, restitution, and the urgent need to rethink institutional narratives and structures from decolonial and critical perspectives.
📩 Registration: [email protected]
Supported by República Portuguesa – Cultura, Juventude e Desporto / Direção-Geral das Artes
#CurrentsOfRestitution #AbolishingTheMuseum #DecolonialPractices #ContemporaryArt
Thank you to everyone who joined the opening of Currents of Restitution: Abolishing the Museum yesterday at Hangar, Lisbon.
On view until 31 January 2026.
Photos by @joaobeijinho
In 𝑆𝑎ℎ𝑢𝑚𝑎𝑑𝑜, Astrid González performs an act of symbolic repatriation through the ritual of sahumerio (smoke cleansing). The video addresses the millions of objects from the Global South held in colonial museums, questioning how they might be remembered, mourned, or spiritually returned. Smoke drifts through the institution’s walls, calling dormant artifacts to awaken and retrace their path home. Merging Afro-descendant cosmologies with contemporary institutional critique, González transforms the gallery space into both a site of mourning and possibility. The work represents a spiritual and discursive attempt to clear the path for these objects to return to their places of origin.
@astridgonzalezq
Image: Still from 𝑆𝑎ℎ𝑢𝑚𝑎𝑑𝑜, 2025 Ⓒ Astrid González
In 𝐶𝑢𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑜 𝑙𝑎𝑠 𝑝𝑎𝑝𝑎𝑠 𝑞𝑢𝑒𝑚𝑎𝑛, Sandra Gamarra depicts a myriad of Andean potato species painted over facsimiles of Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala’s colonial Andean chronicle First New Chronicle and Good Government (1615–16). The original illustrations, denouncing the violence of the Spanish conquest and questioning the notion of “civilization,” were sent to the Spanish King. Gamarra superimposes the potatoes, highlighting the connection between botanics, looting, and scientific discourse.
𝐸𝑥ℎ𝑖𝑏𝑖𝑡𝑜𝑟 𝐼 and 𝐼𝐼 comprises two glass display cases painted with replicas of pre-Columbian artifacts from Spanish museum collections. By reflecting the viewers’ own image on the mirrored surface, Gamarra transforms the museum display into a site of confrontation, where the spectator becomes both witness and participant in the colonial gaze. Mimicking the museological aesthetics of natural history and anthropology museums, the work exposes how institutions have perpetuated hierarchies of race, knowledge, and power under the guise of preservation.
@sandra_gamarra_h
Image: 𝐸𝑥ℎ𝑖𝑏𝑖𝑡𝑜𝑟 and 𝐶𝑢𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑜 𝑙𝑎𝑠 𝑝𝑎𝑝𝑎𝑠 𝑞𝑢𝑒𝑚𝑎𝑛, 2021 Ⓒ Sandra Gamarra
In 𝐶𝑜́𝑚𝑜 𝑙𝑖𝑏𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑟 𝑢𝑛 𝑝𝑎́𝑗𝑎𝑟𝑜 (2025), Pamela Cevallos extends her long-term research on Ecuadorian archaeological collections, focusing on pre-Hispanic ceramic instruments from Manabí, Ecuador, which now remain untouched in Western museum storerooms. Adopting the format of an ironic tutorial for restitution, the video shows artist Javier Rivera molding a clay moñudo—a bird that is part of the local fauna in La Pila, Rivera’s hometown. The object is inspired by a whistle stored at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge. These “encaged” wind instruments become interlocutors in a dialogue about the colonial history of collecting and the violence of preservation, questioning how museums define legitimacy, authenticity, and value. Presented in a workshop space, dozens of replicas in various states of making liberate the memory of the clay. Cevallos proposes a symbolic yet living restitution to interrupt the patrimonial logic that separates pieces from their territories—that which has been taken from the hands that molded it and condemned to silence, now breathes and speaks again.
@pamecevalloss
Image: Still from 𝐶𝑜́𝑚𝑜 𝑙𝑖𝑏𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑟 𝑢𝑛 𝑝𝑎́𝑗𝑎𝑟𝑜, 2025 Ⓒ Pamela Cevallos
𝗔𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗱 𝗚𝗼𝗻𝘇𝗮́𝗹𝗲𝘇 (1994, Medellín) is a multidisciplinary artist working with video, photography, and sculpture to address Afro-descendant histories in the Americas. Her practice examines the colonial roots of representation and processes of resistance and cultural hybridization, while reclaiming the body as a site of memory, struggle, and ancestral pride. A graduate of the Bellas Artes University Foundation (Medellín, with honors), she also completed a Certificate in Afro-Latin American Studies at Harvard University. González has exhibited in Brazil, Chile, Peru, Angola, Portugal, and Colombia, with recent shows at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, Santiago de Chile; the Museum of Modern Art, Medellín; and the Museum of Antioquia. Her distinctions include The Democracy Machine: Artists and Self-Governance in the Digital Age Fellowship (Eyebeam, New York, 2023) and Colombia’s Premio Nuevos Talentos en el Arte.
Image: Still from 𝘚𝘢𝘩𝘶𝘮𝘢𝘥𝘰, 2025 Ⓒ Astrid González"
𝗦𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗿𝗮 𝗚𝗮𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗿𝗮 (1972, Lima; lives in Madrid) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice, spanning painting, sculpture, video, and installation,critically revisits art history and museological structures. Her work interrogates the construction of modernity and the colonial legacies embedded in Western museum collections. Using archival methodologies and strategies of appropriation, she reinterprets institutional imagery to reveal the persistence of racialized and extractive narratives. Gamarra represented Spain at the Venice Biennale 2024 with Pinacoteca Migrante (2023–24), a project confronting colonial representation within European art collections. She has exhibited internationally, including at the Berlin (2018), Montevideo (2016), Cuenca (2011), and São Paulo (2010) Biennials.
Image: 𝘊𝘶𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘰 𝘭𝘢𝘴 𝘱𝘢𝘱𝘢𝘴 𝘲𝘶𝘦𝘮𝘢𝘯, 2021 Ⓒ Sandra Gamarra
𝗣𝗮𝗺𝗲𝗹𝗮 𝗖𝗲𝘃𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘀 (1984, Quito) is a visual artist, anthropologist, and curator whose practice bridges contemporary art and ethnographic research. Her work examines the tensions between institutional heritage frameworks and community-based forms of reappropriation. Since 2015, she has collaborated with the community of La Pila (Manabí, Ecuador), revaluing pre-Hispanic ceramic replicas as critical tools to question authenticity and activate alternative relationships with the past. Through installations, painting, and collaborative projects, Cevallos explores the social life of objects and the politics of archives. She has exhibited at the 22nd Sesc_Videobrasil Biennial, São Paulo (2023) and the 15th and 14th Cuenca Biennials (2021, 2019), and received the Paris Prize (2023) and Mariano Aguilera Prize (2017). Residencies include Delfina Foundation, London; Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; and MeetFactory, Prague. She currently teaches at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador.
Image: Still from 𝐶𝑜́𝑚𝑜 𝑙𝑖𝑏𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑟 𝑢𝑛 𝑝𝑎́𝑗𝑎𝑟𝑜, 2025 Ⓒ Pamela Cevallos"
