Mala at The Salon by NADA & The Community

Mala at The Salon by NADA & The Community
Cammisa Buerhaus, Mauro Cerqueira, Elisa Pône
17.10.2024 – 20.10.2024

30 bis Rue du Paradis, 75010 Paris

Cammisa Buerhaus is an American actress and artist with a performance-based practice. For her solo exhibition at Mala, she created a group of works focused on the performative possibilities of photography and text. Mine! and That’s Mine Too are two photographs from an ongoing series, Performance for the Camera. In this iteration, the artist plays with her cat. Cammisa assumes the role of the director, directing Gomi as she would an actor. Buerhaus’s writings are often modular in form, breaking apart and recombining in unexpected ways. She has created three plays: Isis Virus (2016), The Maze (2018), and Optimistic Voices (2020). Each of these works explores discrete periods in Buerhaus’s life, seen through a distorted, psychedelic lens.

Buerhaus is currently based in Berlin and New York City. She holds an MFA in Music/Sound from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and a BA in Media Studies from Eugene Lang College at The New School. Recent works presented in Portugal include the play Isis Virus at Rua das Gaivotas 6, the dramatic monologue The Maze at Spirit Shop, and the publication of Camicissima Buerhaussss by Growth and Culture. Buerhaus has continued to act, including lead roles in films by Melanie Gilligan, Ken Okishi, Jordan Strafer, and Martine Syms.

Mauro Cerqueira is a Portuguese artist whose most recent solo exhibition, Casas num Beco, was presented at Mala last spring in Lisbon.
“In the series of painting-collages presented in the exhibition, real estate signs that fiercely populate the streets of Porto are stolen from the balconies of houses and transformed through pictorial gestures. Through appropriation and artistic intervention, these objects are removed from their usual circulation in public space and brought to the walls of the gallery, undergoing a radical semantic revaluation. On their surfaces, assemblages are created incorporating metal chains, wire strands, small shards of glass, pieces of plastic—‘treasures’ left behind in the ebb and flow of the street—along with quick sketches drawn on improvised canvases made from packaging materials and scraps of wood.”

Mauro Cerqueira lives and works in Porto, where he maintains the artist-run project Uma Certa Falta de Coerência (A Certain Lack of Coherence). His work has been exhibited in numerous national and international institutions, including Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Museu Coleção Berardo, Caixa Cultural do Rio de Janeiro, Sala de Arte Santander, Centro Federico García Lorca, La Casa Encendida, MAC Elvas, CAV Coimbra, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Galeria Nuno Centeno, Galeria Graça Brandão, Casa Triângulo, Palais Carli Marseille, and Galeria Nogueras Blanchard.

Elisa Pône is a French transdisciplinary artist based in Lisbon, Portugal.
“I manipulate visual and sonic materials, showing a particular interest in ambivalence, excess, and double-bind effects. Attentive to contexts, I play with dissonances and try to exhale the inner dynamics of places in their interaction with the works. I especially like to work with materials of self-determination that overbound their own limits, such as fireworks, waxes, polymers, but also reflections and echoes. Their behaviors challenge the notion of authorship as much as collaborative works often do. Their potential for transformation also involves the notion of duration, which is central to my research, many of my productions being time-based. Insert is a series of embedded resin collages I started in 2023. I have literally gathered materials from my drawers to make what I like to call ‘slow motion / stop motion collages’. The artifact is a set of perishable and long-lasting leftovers from my studio such as black powder, medicines, Polaroids, films, glitters, plastic beads, and food wrappings. The work collides with the reading of Evelyn Reilly’s Styrofoam, a work of poetry that Nuno Marques (author and researcher at the Environmental Humanities Laboratory, KTH Stockholm) sent me as he was about to translate it into Portuguese. In the text she takes us into a discrepant descent into the material components, its chemistry, its applications, and the disasters and wonders of which it has become both the fossil and still the signal.”

Exhibitions and performances include Boca Musgo with Davide Balula, Figura Avulsa, Lisbon; ANDOR!, group exhibition, Póvoa de Varzim (2024, curated by Paula Pinto, Performing the Archive); The Third Nape, solo exhibition, Openspace Nancy (2023, curated by Vincent Verlé); Arder-Havir, with Julien Perez, L’Onde Vélizy-Villacoublay (2022, curated by Léo Guy Denarcy); For the Next Wave That the Next One Erases, solo exhibition, BBB, Toulouse (2021, curated by Marie Bechetoille); Falso Sol, Falsos Olhos, solo exhibition, Quadrum, Lisbon (2020, curated by Estelle Nabeyrat); Cosmo/Política #6, group exhibition, Museu do Neo-Realismo, Vila Franca de Xira (2020, curated by Sandra Vieira Jürgens); La mesure du monde, MRAC Sérignan (2019, curated by Sandra Patron); Some of Us, Kunstwerk Carlshötte, Budelsdorf (2019, curated by Marianne Derrien); La nuit de la pleine lune, La Tôlerie, Clermont-Ferrand (2017); and Alliance Caustique, L’écho des Spectres, Centre Pompidou, Paris; 12Mail and La Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille (2015, curated by Géraldine Gomes, Guillaume Sorge, and Léo Guy Denarcy).

Photo: Studio Abbruzzese, Courtesy of Mala and the artist.