When MOVART Gallery was set up organically as a gallery in 2015 in Luanda, after recognising the existence of an effervescent art scene that lacked structural and economic resources to flourish, with the aim of creating an artistic fabric that would organise and promote existing talent, first in the Angolan milieu and then extending to neighbouring territories, the African continent and the PALOP diaspora, one of the vehicles for establishing this circuit of promotion and discovery was the conception of the MAR (MOVART Art Residency) programme.
With its development, three types of residences were eventually established:
Individual residencies where an artist from the Global South is invited to produce a work for a month, asking him to reflect on different thematic conditions, whether social, local or in the space offered. In addition to the creative freedom we grant to artists, we seek to provide curatorial monitoring, in such a way that the project is ultimately defined in-situ and in a synergic manner between artist, gallery and guest curator. More specifically, MOVART intervenes by providing a space that the artist can use as a studio, and organises a variety of exhibition projects, sometimes not restricted to the gallery, often collaborating with institutions and other creative agents, thus generating a network of contacts. It also organises a series of Open Studio and Artist Talks.
2018 – MOVART’s first artist residency with an institutional link: Ihosvanny Cisneros (b.1975, Angola) at the Spanish Embassy in Angola
2020 – residency by Ihosvanny Cisneros (b.1975, Angola) at MONO Lisboa, resulting in the exhibition AIR IHOSVA (31 Oct – 10 Dec) at the MOVART Lisboa gallery
2022 – residency by David Brits (b.1987, South Africa) in Lisbon, curated by Camila Maissune, which resulted in the exhibition ‘Time Is A Flat Circle’ at MOVART gallery (15 Sep-13 Nov)
2024 – residency by Antonio Bokel (b.1978, Brazil) using MOVART’s future new headquarters as a studio, also practising a conceptual occupation of the space, in its raw state before its architectural renovation, with a series of site-specific installations that were shown to the public on 6 June 2024 at a pop-up event before the opening of the exhibition resulting from the residency, ‘Vazio Inverso’, at MOVART gallery (Jun – Sep).
