Artistas sul-americanas expõem Correntes de Restituição: Abolir o Museu no Hangar
November 24th, 2025, 6 PM — Workshop Escutar Réplicas with Pamela Cevallos
November 27th, 2025, 5 PM — Conversation with Pamela Cevallos and historian Malena Bedoya, moderated by Ana Salazar Herrera
November 27th, 2025, 6 PM to 9 PM – Exhibition Opening
This exhibition will be on view at Hangar until January 31, 2026.
Admission is free.
Rua Damasceno Monteiro, 12
1170-112 Lisbon
Wednesday to Saturday | 3 PM – 7 PM
Still from the film Cómo liberar un pájaro, 2025. © Pamela Cevallos
Opening on November 27 at Hangar – Center for Artistic Research, Currents of Restitution: Abolish the Museum is a group exhibition bringing together three South American artists — Pamela Cevallos, Sandra Gamarra, and Astrid González — whose practices propose imaginative methodologies of resistance and symbolic, spiritual, and discursive restitution.
Inspired by the thought of theorist and activist Françoise Vergès, the exhibition begins with the premise that “European museums are repositories of looting” and questions the possibility of decolonizing institutions born of dispossession and violence. The works on view confront the colonial narratives that underpin European archaeological and ethnographic collections, opening pathways to rethink forms of restitution and the reappropriation of collective memory.
The exhibition includes works by Pamela Cevallos (1984, Quito), visual artist and anthropologist, who in Cómo liberar un pájaro proposes a symbolic restitution of pre-Hispanic ceramic instruments, restoring their breath and voice through collaborative practices; Sandra Gamarra (1972, Lima), who critically explores art history and museological systems, exposing the racial and epistemological hierarchies that sustain Western collections. Her works Cuando las papas queman and Exhibitor I & II confront the colonial gaze and reimagine the museum as a space of resistance; and Astrid González (1994, Medellín), a multidisciplinary artist intertwining Afro-descendant spirituality and institutional critique, presents Sahumado, a video on purification rituals and symbolic repatriation, summoning silenced artifacts to return home.
Curated by Ana Salazar Herrera, an Ecuadorian-Portuguese curator and founder of the Museum for the Displaced, who was co-curator of the 2024 Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale in Saudi Arabia. Between 2022 and 2023, she served as interim curator at the Ludwig Forum Aachen and, from 2016 to 2020, was assistant curator at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. She holds an MA in Curatorial Practice from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and a BA in Piano from the Lisbon Superior School of Music.
Pamela Cevallos (1984, Quito) is a visual artist, anthropologist, and curator whose practice bridges contemporary art and ethnographic research. Her work examines tensions between institutional frameworks of heritage and community forms of reappropriation. Since 2015, she has collaborated with the community of La Pila (Manabí, Ecuador), valuing pre-Hispanic ceramic replicas as critical tools to question authenticity and activate alternative relationships with the past. Through installations, painting, and collaborative projects, Cevallos explores the social life of objects and the politics of archives. She has exhibited at the 22nd Bienal Sesc_Videobrasil (São Paulo, 2023) and the 15th and 14th Cuenca Biennials (2021, 2019), and has received the Paris Prize (2023) and the Mariano Aguilera Prize (2017). She has held residencies at the Delfina Foundation (London), Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), and MeetFactory (Prague). She currently teaches at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador.
Sandra Gamarra (1972, Lima; lives in Madrid) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice—encompassing painting, sculpture, video, and installation—critically revisits art history and museological structures. Her work interrogates the construction of modernity and the colonial legacies embedded in Western museum collections. Employing archival methodologies and strategies of appropriation, she reinterprets institutional imagery to reveal the persistence of racialized and extractivist narratives. Gamarra represented Spain at the 2024 Venice Biennale with the project Pinacoteca Migrante (2023–24), which confronts colonial representation in European art collections. She has exhibited internationally at institutions such as Casa de América (Madrid, 2003), Artium Museum (Vitoria, 2014), the Bass Museum (Florida, 2011), and at the Biennials of Montevideo (2016), Cuenca (2011), and São Paulo (2010).
Astrid González (1994, Medellín) is a multidisciplinary artist working with video, photography, and sculpture, addressing Afro-descendant histories across the Americas. Her practice investigates the colonial roots of representation, the politics of visibility, and processes of resistance and cultural hybridity. A graduate of the Fundación Universitaria Bellas Artes (Medellín, with distinction), she also earned a Certificate in Afro-Latin American Studies from Harvard University. González has exhibited in Brazil, Chile, Peru, Angola, Portugal, and Colombia, with recent shows at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights (Santiago, Chile), the Museum of Modern Art of Medellín, and the Museum of Antioquia. Her distinctions include the Eyebeam Fellowship “The Democracy Machine: Artists and Self-Governance in the Digital Age” (New York, 2023) and the New Talents in Colombian Art Award. Her work revisits hegemonic history through Afro-diasporic lenses, reclaiming the body as a space of memory, struggle, and ancestral pride.