MNAC Chiado – Sonae Media Art Award & Gender in Art

In 2017–2018, MNAC – Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado in Lisbon hosted two notable concurrent programs. The Sonae Media Art Award, launched in 2015 through a partnership between Sonae and the MNAC, was created to recognize a national or foreign artist resident in Portugal up to the age of 40. Reflecting the vitality of creative work at the intersection of art and technology, the award had by that point produced two winners — Tatiana Macedo (2015) and Rodrigo Gomes (2017). Described as the largest Portuguese project to encourage art production in new media, the award focuses on work built from disciplinary intersections, covering forms of contemporary creation that use digital and electronic mediums ranging from image and sound to video, film, computing, and mixed media. Running alongside these award cycles, the exhibition Gender in Art: Body, Sexuality, Identity, Resistance, curated by Aida Rechena and Teresa Furtado, was on view from October 2017 through March 2018. Premised on the idea that gender is not something people possess but rather something continuously constructed in daily life and social interaction, the show brought together works by fourteen Portuguese artists — including Alice Geirinhas, Ana Vidigal, Carla Cruz, Gabriel Abrantes, João Pedro Vale and Nuno Alexandre Ferreira, and Vasco Araújo — to spark reflection and debate around the themes of body, sexuality, identity, and resistance. The exhibition was well received in the Portuguese press and was also recognized with the Arco-Íris Prize for Equality in Culture, awarded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.