Susanne S. D. Themlitz (Lisbon, Portugal, 1968) is one of Portugal’s most renowned artists. In her practice, the artist develops an imbricated relationship between the real, the imaginary and the occult, and creates a unique image vocabulary about the human and the universal.

In a permanent state of metamorphosis, her works reveal a characteristic entropic power and address issues that pertain to the domains of the natural, the oneiric, chance and the occult, the variability of materials and media, and dreams, among other categories. While the construction of universes — imaginary and tangible — has remained a constant in her work over time, a particular economy of gesture has also become increasingly present. On the one hand, her sculptures and installations began to have less of an anthropomorphic reminiscence and, in their place, objects, artefacts and small imaginary memories of that human past-present appeared.

E lá dentro. Vento., 2024

Installation, variable dimensions

Courtesy of Galeria Vera Cortês.

In E lá dentro. Vento. is a presentification of an encounter between distant times and places. In this landscape-installation, Susanne S. D. Themlitz combines raw materials, sculptures, and videos previously present in her career, in an unprecedented work commissioned by the Biennial. In symbiosis, human and phantasmatic sculptural pieces permeated cohabit the space with the central structure of the piece, built from a play of balance between bamboo canes, iron scaffolding and plasterboards, and with the videos Parallel Territories (Lines) (2007), Still Life (2007), Antropofobias & Etolomanias (2002) and The Bavarian Worm (2005), populated by extraordinary creatures. Located in an intermediate space of the Monastery of Santa Clara-a-Nova, the installation E lá dentro. Vento. proposes inventive ways of traversing the work's territory and physically relating to the reality of its surroundings.