Artists

João Maria Gusmão

Press release

Following the White Tiger is a solo exhibition by Portuguese artist João Maria Gusmão, comprising a multichannel array of looping 16mm projected works. The exhibition presents the latest results of the artist’s process-based experiments with analogue means and speculative concepts, examining the relationship between history, ideology, and aesthetics and their material correlates. In a present increasingly dominated by digital images, Gusmão draws attention to the particular qualities of analogue film – its physicality, its technical processes of production, and the traces of light recorded on the film strip. The artist explores the tension between the tangible construction of the image – the photosensitive transparency, projection, and mechanisms of recording – and its symbolic dimension, where images operate as carriers of cultural and ideological meanings. His works reveal the image as both a material object and a site of memory and imagination. The title of the exhibition is drawn from João Maria Gusmão’s recent work The School of the White Tiger (2024), a sequence of vertical still shots depicting a kung fu dojo in France. Here, the covering up of graffiti on the building’s façade is imagined as a form of abstract painting inspired by movement, gesture, and the animal world. Gusmão connects this cinematic chance encounter to Mao Zedong, the Chinese leader, and his “paper tiger” parable—an expression used to describe American imperialism and the nuclear threat during the Cold War. The motif becomes a point of departure for reflecting on the tension between the appearance of strength and an underlying fragility, between what is visible and what remains concealed. In his work, Gusmão emphasizes film as an apparatus of illusion that creates the impression of movement through a succession of still images. His works explore the relationship between the real and its representations, bringing together the realms of the human, the technological, the animal, and the inhuman. The exhibition brings together a dozen film works, many of which were developed through production residencies with Zachęta. Described by Gusmão as “film sculptures”, these works maintain a spectral and associative logic, creating a space where repetition, gesture, and the materiality of film shape the experience of the image. Drawing from the everyday, Gusmão subtly addresses a violence embedded in Western imaginaries – both symbolic and material. Through an ironic engagement with a particular form of orientalism, including kung fu, Zen culture, the reception of Mao Zedong’s writings by French intellectuals, and the ways in which the West constructs representations of the East, the artist proposes a poetic “third way” that resists binary oppositions. Technique – understood both as a routine and as a technological means of creating and manipulating images – becomes, in Gusmão’s work, a way of knowing and revealing the visible and the unseen, uncovering the entanglement between the technical and what extends beyond direct experience. After this presentation, Following the White Tiger will travel to Portugal, where the project will develop through a special presentation at Sismógrafo, in Porto, and the production of a new artwork made in collaboration with students at the School of Arts at Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Porto. In March 2027, the project will culminate in an expanded large-scale exhibition at Museum of Art and Technology (MAAT) in Lisbon, and the release of a publication featuring stylized texts written by the artist and curator, expressed through an unorthodox, discursive challenging of the protocols that tether thought to imagery. Information for Exhibition Visitors This exhibition contains stroboscopic light effects. Visitors with epilepsy or sensitivity to flashing lights are advised to exercise particular caution. Due to the specific nature of the film works on display, the projectors in Room 13 may be switched off periodically to allow them to cool down. Planned interruptions to the screenings will last approximately 30 minutes, and their start times will be indicated on site. It may also happen that an individual screening pauses briefly or experiences minor disruptions. This is part of the nature of analogue film - a medium whose materiality and technical character are an important element of the works on display. Thank you for your understanding and patience in the event of any interruptions to the screenings. ABOUT THE ARTIST For more than two decades, the Lisbon-based artist João Maria Gusmão (b. 1979) has developed an enigmatic and complex set of practices and meta-practices ranging from experimental analogue film to primitive photography techniques, encompassing sculpture and drawing and moving image installations, and extending to literature, exhibition making, and publishing. At the core of his practice lies a distinctive strategy of critical archaeology, in which he reactivates early image-making technologies to explore alternative ways of perceiving time, space, and reality. His films, photographs, and objects draw on literary references and metaphysical inquiries, evoking speculative and poetic worldviews rooted in art, science, and philosophy. From 2001 to 2018, Gusmão collaborated with Pedro Paiva, forming an acclaimed artist duo that exhibited at premier exhibition venues internationally, and represented Portugal at the 53rd Venice Biennale and participated in the 55th edition of the event in 2013. Their work features in various international museum collections, among which the Museum of Art in Łódź, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, MACBA, Centre Georges Pompidou, Tate Modern, SFMOMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco and the Museu de Serralves. Since 2019, he has pursued a solo career while also working closely with other artists as a curator, editor, writer, and purveyor of the publishing house Pato em Pequim. ABOUT THE CURATOR Post Brothers is a critical enterprise that includes Matthew Post, an enthusiast, word processor, educator, and (co)dependent curator engaged in artist-oriented projects and critical fabulations. From 2016-2019, Post Brothers was the curator at Kunstverein München, Munich, Germany, and from 2021-2023, they were an Associate Professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark. They have curated numerous exhibitions and projects across the world and regularly publish essays in artist publications, exhibition catalogues, and art and cultural journals. Some recent curated exhibitions include: Breaking the Joints, a group exhibition concerning the relationship between animation and the body at Sapieha Palace, Vilnius (2025); Drain the Öresund, a regional group exhibition at Malmö Konsthall (2025); In the beginning was the deed!, an exhibition inspired by local histories of insurrectionary anarchism at the Galeria Arsenał in Białystok, Poland (2021); and Mercury, a visual essay curated in collaboration with the artist Simon Dybbroe Møller for the Tallinn Photomonth 2019 Biennial. They also participate in exhibitions with text-based and performative contributions, and lecture in art and educational contexts across Europe. They live in Kolonia Koplany, a small village near Białystok, Poland.