MAM Screen 021: Gabriel Abrantes

Gabriel Abrantes (born 1984 in North Carolina, USA; lives and works in Lisbon) has spent his career exploring filmic expression in film and video as a scriptwriter, director, producer, and actor. Abrantes is known for his handling of historical, political and social themes including post-colonialism, gender, and identity. His novel approach to storytelling, laced with humor and absurdity, adds new twists to myth, legend, historical fact, and social convention. Abrantes is also notable for his ability to deploy elements of popular culture appropriated from Hollywood movie genres such as melodrama, romantic comedy, war and adventure movies, to make works that raise issues in an accessible manner.

This edition of MAM Screen features Les Extraordinaires Mésaventures de la Jeune Fille de Pierre (The Marvelous Misadventures of the Stone Lady) (2019), in which a nondescript ornamental sculpture of a girl in the Louvre escapes the museum and confronts the real world on a Paris street corner; Two Sculptures Quarreling in a Hotel Room (2020), derived from this film; Os Humores Artificiais (Artificial Humors) (2016), which deals with the anthropology of humor, portraying love between an indigenous girl and artificial intelligence; and Ornithes (Birds) (2012), which could also be described as a modern restaging of the eponymous Greek comedy by Aristophanes.

Works Screened

1. Les Extraordinaires Mésaventures de la Jeune Fille de Pierre (The Marvelous Misadventures of the Stone Lady), 2019, 19 min. 53 sec.

2. Two Sculptures Quarreling in a Hotel Room, 2020, 1 min. 24 sec.

3. Os Humores Artificiais (Artificial Humors), 2016, 29 min. 7 sec.

4. Ornithes (Birds), 2012, 17 min. 45 sec.

Screenings last approximately 70 minutes in total and begin at
10:00, 11:10, 12:20, 13:30, 14:40, 15:50, 17:00, 18:10, 19:20, 20:30.
* The last screening begins at 15:50 on Tuesdays (excluding April 29, and May 6), as the museum closes at 17:00.

Gabriel Abrantes

Born 1984 in North Carolina, USA, lives and works in Lisbon. He has shown his work at museums such as the Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2010), Institute of Contemporary Arts (London, 2014), MIT List Visual Arts Center (Boston, MA, 2013), KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin, 2013), Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian (Lisbon, 2016 and 2023), Tate Britain (London, 2016), Lincoln Center (New York, 2016), CaixaForum Madrid (2016), Tate Modern (London, 2019), Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon, 2020), Salzburger Kunstverein (Salzburg, Australia, 2021), among others. In addition, he participated international exhibitions such as the 68th Venice Film Festival (2011), the 32nd São Paulo Biennale (2016), and the 16th Lyon Biennal (France, 2022).
He received the EDP New Artists Award in 2009, the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 2010, the European Film Award at the Berlin Film Festival in 2014 and 2016. His film Diamantino (2018, co-directed with Daniel Schmid) won the Grand Prize at La Semaine de la Critique in Cannes Film Festival in 2018.