Joana Vasconcelos: Guest of Honour
BRAFA 2025, Brussels
January 26 – February 2, 2025
© Lionel Balteiro | LaMousse
Courtesy Atelier Joana Vasconcelos
Dream Curtain, 2023
© Andre Nacli
Courtesy Museu Oscar Niemeyer
Joana Vasconcelos is a Portuguese visual artist, born in 1971. Over the course of her 30-year career, she has made use of a wide variety of media. Although she has a preference for textiles, Joana Vasconcelos also works with cement, metal, ceramics, glass, and found objects. She is renowned for her monumental sculptures and immersive installations. Her ambition is to decontextualise everyday objects and revisit the concept of craft in the twenty-first century. Her humorous, ironic work examines the status of women, consumer society and collective identity.
Her international reputation was consolidated in 2005, at the first Venice Biennale curated by women, where she presented her piece The Bride, a classically shaped chandelier whose crystal pendants had been replaced by approximately 14,000 tampons.
Joana Vasconcelos was the youngest artist and the first woman to exhibit at the Château de Versailles in 2012. In 2018, she became the first Portuguese artist to have a solo show at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. In 2023, she had the honour of exhibiting at the Uffizi Galleries and the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, alongside great masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Caravaggio.
At BRAFA 2025, she will be exhibiting two Valkyries, sculptures inspired by the female figures from Norse mythology who flew over the battlefields, bringing the bravest warriors back to life to join the deities in Valhalla. Made from textiles, they give full expression to the artist’s creativity, involving a variety of fabrics and trimmings. The result is a surprising combination of volumes, textures and colours. Made up of a central body, a head, a tail and several arms, many of the Valkyries combine traditional craftsmanship with more technological methods, such as the insertion of light to simulate vibration and breathing, which gives movement to the work.
