a

HENRIQUE J. PARIS 

Artistic and Research
Projects


Still and Moving
Image Productions

Curatorial and Social
Practices 
Recent and
Upcoming 
HJP is an Angolan art and research practitioner dissecting philosophical, architectonic and scenographic frameworks in relation to enacted modes of power, moral codes and Christian discipleship. His work seeks to push boundaries between visual media and socially engaged practices, using mixed media installations, placemaking and still-moving-images as sites of contestation.

Supported by the Sir Frank Bowling Scholarship, Paris’s ongoing doctoral investigation traces the entanglements between contemporary built environments and stigmatised social experiences. It attends to immersive modes of historiography.

Selected Press

ALTO AR

 Solo Exhibition

Situated in Vale da Amoreira in the Setúbal District, the neighbourhood where J. Paris grew up, the exhibition invites us into his investigation through listening to images, reading movement and sensing the sound of a territory shaped by migration, labour and everyday resistance. Attentive to architectural conditions of degradation and marginalisation, the project traces resistance as both a response to these conditions and a method in itself.

The artist-researcher examines how history continues to reproduce itself across spatial and social dimensions. As Amílcar Cabral reminds us in Sobre Resistência e Força Contrária (1974), every force exerted upon a given body generates resistance, an opposing force:
It is this counterforce that disrupts the inscription and regulation of space in places where the State determines who may live and who may die, demarcating zones of execution, abandonment and incarceration.

The exhibition attends to intangible movements, revisiting and intensifying histories of displacement, chronologies, maps, symbols and memories through space and through the bodies that inhabit it. It reaches upward, beyond the social limits imposed by visibility and by prescribed forms of being. In Alto Ar, the archive operates simultaneously as method and tool, interrogating regimes of knowledge, the circulation of power and the capacity of lived experience to reconfigure institutional histories. The works unfold across intersecting layers, dissolving boundaries between the domestic and the public, as well as the intimate and the infrastructural.

J. Paris treats memory as a force, something that presses upon the present. The title plays on the proximity between author and altar, proposing authorship as an act of offering and devotion. It reflects an ongoing investigation into truth, relation and the politics of testimony, into how speaking and listening occur within inherited structures of belief and processes of monumentalisation; Alto Ar is a gesture of suspension and displacement. 
Between choreographed archives and reimagined spatialities, Henrique J. Paris invites us to consider other ways of inhabiting and remembering, opening fissures for alternative cartographies and epistemologies.


Curated by Nael D’Almeida
Supported by FLAD Luso-American Development Foundation


BANTUMEN