What´s for dinner?
(2022)
What’s for dinner? looks at dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins beyond the human body, tracing how these chemicals shape behaviour across species — from optimism in starlings and social bonding in orcas to aggression in honeybees and hibernation in brown bears. Drawing on scientific diagrams and behavioural studies, the exhibition gives visual form to these microscopic processes, unsettling the idea that emotions such as hope, attachment or anticipation belong exclusively to us.
Against a culture increasingly invested in managing mood, productivity and ‘wellness’, these biological mechanisms become a way of questioning how much control we actually exercise over how we feel. Moving between scientific research, humour and speculation, What’s for dinner? approaches the pursuit of feeling better as a recurring biological loop: anticipation, reward, satisfaction, decline — and the inevitable desire for whatever comes next.
Location
Balcony Gallery, Lisbon
Dates
2022
Materials
Mixed fabric, acrylic resin, wool, wood
TAKE TEN takes the pink walls of Las Palmas Project Space as both material and proposition. Closely resembling Baker-Miller Pink — a colour controversially associated with calming aggressive behaviour — the existing architecture becomes the starting point for an investigation into colour as a purported tool for regulating mood, behaviour and wellbeing.
The exhibition traces this promise through a series of materials associated with soothing, healing or relief, including calamine, Himalayan salt, bismuth subsalicylate and cochineal pigment. Their apparent benignity is repeatedly complicated: cochineal requires the mass harvesting of insects; excessive exposure or consumption produces adverse effects; and the therapeutic claims surrounding Baker-Miller Pink remain disputed. Through sculpture, painting, textile and a continuously running fountain, TAKE TEN constructs an environment in which reassurance gradually becomes suspect, using humour and contradiction to question the impulse to package discomfort into something manageable, attractive and calm.
