Through her multidisciplinary practice, Carla Filipe (Vila Nova da Barquinha, Portugal, 1973) critically scrutinises the relationship between art objects, popular culture and political activism. Anchored in drawing and often appropriating artefacts and historical documents, revolutionary iconographies, flags, posters and graffiti, her work seeks to compose a social and subjective portrait of contemporaneity.

Autobiography as an experimental archive of contemporaneity is one of the artist’s strategies to connect the individual to the collective. In its cyclical writing and rewriting, history is a filter used to deepen our understanding of the political, social and cultural transformations that condition past and present times. In this continuous constructive exercise, her work covers a range of themes, from questions about territory and identity, to notions of labour and property, to the concept of representation.

As esposas e mulheres (mulher anonima) de um corpo político ausente sob uma artificialidade de um corpo presente, 2022

Five flags, digital print on 100% latex fabric

Artist’s collection (Artist’s proof).

Celas VI, 2024

Offset print on newsprint, variable dimensions

Artist’s collection.

In The Phantom of Liberty, two different projects with the characteristic graphics of Carla Filipe’s work cohabit in one of the rooms of the Monastery of Santa Clara-a-Nova. Celas VI, commissioned by the Biennial, is an installation created by replicating the images of the grids of convent architecture. Symbolising the separation from the outside world, the convent’s railings metaphorically permeate the lives of cloistered women, governed by a strict hierarchy that reflects their class differences.

In a dialogical relationship, As esposas e mulheres (mulher anonima) de um corpo político ausente sob uma artificialidade de um corpo presente, part of a project realised in 2022, intervenes in historical images of political protests and demonstrations, replacing men’s faces with women’s faces. The installation, made up of large flags, also features the presence of two women recognised by the history of political struggle in Portugal: Catarina Eufémia, a farm worker murdered by the National Republican Guard following a strike by rural wage-earners in 1954, and Lourdes Pintasilgo, who headed the Fifth Constitutional Government between July 1979 and January 1980 and was the only woman to hold the position of Prime Minister in the country.