Manuela Marques, Passage 1, 2022
EN⭢ FR
Centre Culturel Français Freiburg, Fribourg-en-Brisgau
7 mai - 4 septembre
du lundi au jeudi de 9h à 17h15, le samedi de 9h à 13h45
Vernissage le 7 mai
Rencontre-discussion le 5 juin à 10h30, menée par Nicolas Bézard
Manuela Marques’s work is part of a contemporary exploration of landscape representation and the construction of the gaze. It evolves from unique environments, viewed as genuine territories for exploration and research. Each site she engages with becomes a space for investigation where different layers of perception intersect and overlap, bringing historical, geographical, and scientific data into dialogue with a sensitive and experimental approach. This approach unfolds through photographic works, videos, sound pieces, and installations, conceived as devices for observation and experience.
Her practice is based on the development of in situ working protocols and strategies of attention that question the modes of perception and appropriation of the territory. By staging elements collected in the field, she constructs an “other nature,” conceived as a theater of the landscape where reality is analyzed, displaced, and reinterpreted. Each territory is thus viewed as a carrier of specific forms, rhythms, and narratives, revealing invisible layers of writing that her work seeks to make perceptible.
Manuela Marques, born in Portugal, lives and works between France and Portugal. She is represented by Galerie Anne Barrault (Paris) and Rui Freire Fine Arts (Lisbon).
Developing a practice rooted in the fields of photography and video, she explores the relationships between materiality and immateriality, the visible and the invisible, perception and representation. Using elements from the natural world and everyday objects, she creates images that question the ways we see and interpret, creating tension between presence and absence, light and shadow, form and indeterminacy.
Her work has been presented in numerous institutions in France and internationally. In France, she has exhibited, among others, at the André Malraux Museum (2022), the Domaine de Kerguéhennec (2022), the Lodève Museum (2019), the Cyel Art Center, La Roche-sur-Yon (2019), the Centre Photographique d’Île-de-France, the FRAC Auvergne (2024), the Musée d’Aurillac (2016), the Château d’Eau in Toulouse (2015), the C.R.P. in Douchy-les-Mines (2014), and the FRAC Normandie (2013).
In 2024, she also presented her work at SAMOCA—the Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art in Riyadh, confirming the international scope of her practice.
Manuela Marques, Ligne de faille, 2022. Courtesy Galerie Anne Barrault 
Manuela Marques, Porteuse 3, 2022. Courtesy Galerie Anne Barrault