
Catarina de Oliveira

Catarina de Oliveira was born in 1984, she lives and works in Lisbon (PT).
My work experiments with narration and stories told through films, performances, and texts. I am fascinated by the way stories and images have the power to expose us to poetry while simultaneously confronting us with moments of life, representations of social or individual reality. My works gather various impressions, memories, allegories, and thoughts, with montages of failures, repetitions, and variations of motifs giving rise to cyclical, multi-voiced narratives.
I am particularly interested in how contemporary Western society understands and refers to time and memory. Through my work, I have studied how certain authorities and entities strive to perpetuate certain myths and how historical and cultural narratives are generated. Different authorities have found in progressive and dialectical forms of narration a way to assert their agendas and secure their hegemony. To ensure that these forms become conduits for their authority, it is necessary for the categories and entities they encompass to be perceived as unified and stable truths. My practice is populated by characters, places, objects, and memories that are not stable or fully crystallized entities but are rather fragmented or in motion. The narratives in my works rarely behave in a linear fashion. They thus draw attention to the organizational and compositional models that the stories and History we have inherited might encompass.
Catarina de Oliveira holds a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the Piet Zwart Institute (Rotterdam, NL) in 2012. Recently, her work has been shown at Parkour (Lisbon, PT), Serralves Museum (Porto, PT), The Watermill Center (NY, US), Bonheur Theater (Rotterdam, NL), and at HEAD (Geneva, CH). She received a support grant in 2013 from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation for the duration of her residency.