Following the production and presentation, since 2007, at the Museum of Neo-Realism (Vila Franca de Xira) of several contemporary art cycles, our collection has received works by relevant Portuguese artists in this area, which has made it possible to establish dialogues with social and political issues of our time. This is the scope that crosses and unites many of the creative contributions exhibited, through a critical reinvention of reality, as an answer to the curatorial motto of the Macao International Art Biennale: “Hello, what are you doing here?” And what brought us here was, in fact, the combination of our city’s identity with this path of freedom and experimentalism of the creative arts.

Since the post-minimalism of the 1960s and 1970s, a significant part of the artistic experience has emphasized a need for critical questioning about the place of art in contemporary society, early combining a strong political statement with the desire and the need to relate with artists, work processes, communities, and the public. A culture of interdisciplinary counter-visuality then developed, which began to question the historical conditions of artistic production and legitimacy, in opposition to the formalist and self-referential reading of a certain triumphant modernism, which defended the autonomy and disciplinary exploration of the work of art.

The new logic of intervention of this “progressive postminimalism,” as Hal Foster called it, was based on the possibilities, even if specific and of local expression, of understanding or partially transforming social reality through artistic action. The “expanded field” of sculpture, the ephemerality and “dematerialization” of the work of art provoked a strong, albeit temporary, destabilization of the art institution. Thus, a “return “of” and “to” the real” occurred, which resulted in its critical “reinvention,” questioning the institutional place and the concept of art, demanding from the public a greater awareness of their responsibility in building and valuing the semantic field of art and, through this, of life itself.

Thus, a closer connection between art and the social and political sense has resulted in one of the most defining creative universes to date. A political attitude (still inspired, at times, by reminiscences of the utopian) or a (dystopian) reflection on its limits runs through, in its multiple forms and (inter) disciplinary devices, the path and work of the artists in this exhibition. Questioning above all the discursive regimes that operate in our image-saturated world, art today demands a kind of visual literacy that allows us to understand and feel a more complex and disseminating creative action, which underlines in its work apparatus the dependence and contamination verified between the creative process, the image and verbal language, thus operating a critical analysis around the fragmentation and deceptive virtualization of contemporary reality.