Miriam Sampaio
I am the Daughter of Dead-fathers

From September 6 to November 3, 2018
Opening on September 7 from 5 pm to midnight

As if on the periphery of the gaze, because often what commands our attention is located outside the frame, the work of Ismaïl Bahri, James Benning, Ralitsa Doncheva and Miriam Sampaio carefully documents the occupation of a site which, for reasons both personal and political, is the only witness, even the sole legatee, of past or future events, giving form to an exile either desired or imposed, permanent or temporary.

The installation I am the Daughter of Dead-fathers presents images shot in the Lisbon detention centre of Portugal’s former state police, PIDE, just before it was renovated and converted into luxury apartments. Sampaio shows in detail the vestiges of this space, where anti-fascists were interrogated and likely tortured and where she suspects her own father was held in the 1960s. 

The final images, initially shot on Super-8 and then blown up to 16mm film, reframed and sometimes even flooded with light, explore different material temporalities, reveal invisible layers, and introduce phantom narratives of a traumatic political – and family – history by attempting to reconstruct an alternative site in the exhibition space.

FC

Miriam Sampaio, daughter of political refugees, was born in Montréal in 1966 and currently divides her time between Montréal and London (England). Influenced by her Sephardi Portuguese Jewish heritage, in her work she invokes forgotten scars and their history. These deeply enigmatic films make perceptible what was and what persists in fragments. Following studies in Fine Arts at Concordia University, she focused her work on cinema, photography and installation. At the same time, she developed a practice as an independent curator. Her work has been shown in Europe, the United States, Canada and Mexico. She has been the recipient of several grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and one from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Her video work is distributed by Groupe Intervention Vidéo (GIV) in Montreal.