João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva
Lua Cão (with Alexandre Estrela)

From 17 February until 15 April 2018, Kunstverein München presents Lua Cão – a large-scale exhibition that tests the intersection of experimental film and video via the extensive bodies of work of Alexandre Estrela and the duo João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva. Co-organized by Natxo Checa, the exhibition spans both floors of the Kunstverein.

Lua Cão is an immersive moving-image experiment with 21 films, videos, and images, arranged in five constellations. Every fifteen minutes the exhibition changes, following a four-hour-long technical script implemented by a projectionist, who turns the equipment on and off, and can give interpretative background or answer questions.

Originally presented by Galeria Zé dos Bois in Azores and Lisbon, Lua Cão is the result of more than a decade and a half of conversation between Checa, Estrela, and Gusmão and Paiva. The title refers to a rare optical phenomenon where the moon’s light is refracted to appear in a halo with a pair of adjacent ‘moon dogs’. Moons, eyeballs, multiple exposures, tunnels, light rays, and atmospheric and optical illusions proliferate throughout the exhibition to emphasize the role the mechanics of vision plays in both artistic practices, and to demonstrate their shared interest in the moving image that consistently connects abstractions to illusions, the everyday to the impossible.

A new bilingual publication of ‘literary miniatures’, written by the artists and curators, will be available – the eleventh in the Kunstverein’s Companion series, co-published with Roma Publications, Amsterdam.