Tânia Dinis (Vila Nova de Famalicão, 1983), holds a Master’s degree in Contemporary Artistic Practices from FBAUP (2015) and a degree in Theater Studies, from ESMAE (2006).
Her work crosses different perspectives and artistic fields – photography, performance, cinema – in a relational aesthetic, starting from personal or anonymous family archive images such as photographs, films, other visual materials and their appropriation in a time-image-memory-dream relationship
In 2013, she made her first short film, Não são favas, são feijocas, which was awarded at several film festivals, followed by other works – Arco da Velha (2015), Laura (2017) and Armindo e a Câmara Escura (2017).
She produced several performative projects, among others the performance Bastidores (2019), which originated from photographic archives of the Teatro Municipal Rivoli (Porto) and its former employees, Álbuns da Terra (2020-2021), Linha de Tempo – Imaginário familiar (2021), Álbuns da Guerra (with Catarina Laranjeiro, 2021). She has collaborated on projects curated by Eduarda Neves, with the production company Bando à Parte, with the CAAA – Centro para os Assuntos da Arte e Arquitectura, and A Oficina.
NOSTALGIA DA IMAGEM | IMPRESSÕES
Images: courtesy Tânia Dinis
NOSTALGIA DA IMAGEM | IMPRESSÕES
The artistic practice of Tânia Dinis arises from research and creative work on intimacy, and takes place through an assiduous confrontation with the archive – with family albums, documents and other objects of memory – that she finds in her family environment, in the anonymous agglomerations of fairs and markets, or in situations of sharing with specific communities.
Starting from this research, the artist appropriates the images, and presents them, in the context of a performance, rearranged, cut, and reproduced in transparent material, and reactivates them through an installation that uses luminous devices such as light boards or projectors, complemented by sound fragments recorded by magnetophones.
Through a slow manipulation of images, Tânia Dinis produces intersections and overlaps, following the interior rhythm of the archive, using materials such as cellophane, magnifying glasses and filters. The artist thus builds small narrative sequences, in an exercise of confrontation between image and sound, exploring the various possibilities of fictional staging, and, simultaneously, the idea of the image as an experience of the ephemerality of time and memory.
The images and audiovisual recordings presented in this gallery refer to two of the artist’s most recent creations.
Nostalgia da Imagem – fotografia em movimento, memória e arquivo de família (2022) is based on material found in a women’s boarding school and reflects the experience of observing a photographic album and the work of exploring a diary, audio records, and letters, exchanged between a woman and her partner, who had fled to France before the 25th of April.
Impressões (2022), on the other hand, has as its object the memories and sharing of images and other documents, of a group of people linked to the graphic industry of the former Armazéns do Papel do Sado, in Setúbal, crossing the political history of the city and of the country, placing itself in a register that combines the documentary and the fictional.
Compared with her previous works, in these latest creations, which are presented here in a joint and interconnected way, the artist achieves even more complex solutions, with greater theoretical-artistic depth. Tânia Dinis amplifies the performative dimension by creating a scenic device composed of multiple layers, in which the images return to their material form, and like paper statues, dialogue with the projected images and even with the artist’s own body, connected through gestures that link the present to the past, in a true intermedial theater of figures.
Nostalgia da imagem – fotografia em movimento, memória e arquivo de família
2022
Criação: Tânia Dinis
Processo – residência artística
CAMPUS – Paulo Cunha e Silva – Porto
Impressões
2022
Criação e Interpretação: Tânia Dinis
Pesquisa: Tânia Dinis e Pedro Bastos
Texto: Pedro Bastos
Espaço cénico: Tânia Dinis
MAPS – Mostra de Artes Performativas em Setúbal
Bolsas de Criação Artística – A Gráfica – Centro de Criação Artística – Câmara Municipal de Setúbal
