The Friends of S.M.A.K. present the work of the Portuguese artist Joana Escoval.
The delicate works of Joana Escoval resemble remnants from the pre-industrial past or objects from the distant future. Her sculptures of earthenware and metal and her installations with moss, feathers, stones, seashells and tropical leaves blur the boundary between culture and nature. Inspired by nature’s motifs, alchemy and cultures such as that of the American Navajo, her creations refer to ritual implements and transitional places. They have the momentum of conductors or a current of energy that interweave form and content, living and dead matter, the concrete and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible. In Escoval's world nothing is decreed, everything is entwined and connected.
Joana Escoval (b.1982) lives and works in Lisbon. Her practice circumscribes both visual and aural in the form of sculpture, collective walks, installations, and printed matter. She won the BES Revelação Prize 2012 and was nominated for the EDP Foundation New Artists Prize (2015), in Portugal. She has been a resident artist at Fiorucci Art Trust, Stromboli, 2015; Residency Unlimited, New York 2013–14 and at Halfhouse, Barcelona 2011. Among other venues, she has exhibited and screened her work at Museum Colecção Berardo, Lisbon 2020; Tenderpixel, London 2019; Centre d’Art la Panera, Lleida, Spain 2019, Fiorucci Art Trust, London 2018; La Casa Encendida, Madrid 2017; Kunsthalle Lissabon and Kunsthalle Tropical, Iceland 2016; La Criée Centre for Contemporary Art, Rennes, France 2016; MAAT: Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon 2015; Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, Paris 2015; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo 2014.
